Welcome to the United Nations
Addressee: IFAD
Full Text
The Permanent Forum congratulates the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) for its ongoing work with indigenous peoples, including the operationalization of free, prior and informed consent in its funded projects, support for national policy dialogues among indigenous peoples, governments and United Nations country teams and adoption of data disaggregation for indigenous peoples in its revised Results and Impact Management System. The Forum encourages the Fund to develop specific indicators on the well-being of indigenous peoples, to be applied in its funded projects. The Forum urges IFAD to ensure that its high standards and safeguards are applied to its co-funded projects initiated by institutions that invest in large infrastructure.
Responses
IFAD supported projects and programmes approved in the past biennium provide some good examples in terms of inclusion of monitoring and evaluation indicators disaggregated by ethnicity to reflect indigenous peoples’ participation and to monitor/ensure the benefits of ethnic minorities from participating in projects recently approved in China, Nepal, Indonesia and Philippines. In the Western States Agribusiness Project in Myanmar, all monitoring and evaluation data, analysis and reporting will be disaggregated by ethnicity, while the Project to Support Agricultural and Rural Financial Inclusion in Burundi will manage the risk of exclusion of the indigenous population by closely monitoring the percentage of indigenous beneficiaries and the percentage of their population in the target area. In Indonesia, the Rural Empowerment and Agriculture Development Scaling-up Initiative, identifies the monitoring and evaluation system as a tool to draw conclusive lessons on responses to the needs and priorities of indigenous people and how these may differ from the wider community. Going beyond data disaggregation, IFAD committed in its Strategic Framework 2016-2025 to integrate specific indicators on the well-being of indigenous peoples to capture impacts and results. An interesting example is proposed by the newly approved Market for Village Farmers Project - Market Bilong Vilis Fama in Papua New Guinea, which will include specific indicators to measure the valuing of traditional knowledge and crops in the project implementation manual; these indicators will be identified during the assessment study to measure the improvement of livelihoods based on the perspective and wellbeing of the indigenous peoples. While data disaggregation for indigenous peoples/ethnic groups is being adopted in many IFAD-funded operations, the application of specific indicators on the wellbeing of indigenous peoples to the projects remains an important challenge for the Fund. The next action will be to review the consolidated list of indicators suggested by the representatives of indigenous peoples during the second global meeting of the Indigenous Peoples Forum at IFAD and refine the indicators to be measurable and adoptable at project level. One indicator that is missing and requires particular attention is the indicator on participation and FPIC, which needs further discussion as to how the participation of indigenous peoples can be measured throughout the life of a project.
Final Report of UNPFII Session 17 (2018)
Area of Work
