Rimisp – Latin American Center for Rural Development celebrated its 20th Anniversary in 2006.  Rimisp is a regional non-profit organization.  Its goal is to promote organizational learning and innovation in public and private policies, projects and programs, in ways that advance social inclusion, equity, well-being and vibrant democracies in Latin American rural societies. To this end, it works in close collaboration with individuals and organizations, public and private, national and international, throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Rimisp carries out four types of activities:

• Applied multi-disciplinary research to understand critical changes in rural societies and in their contexts, focusing on how these changes affect poverty and inequality.
  
• Systematization of creative and effective poverty and inequality reduction experiences, to identify and share lessons and good practices that can stimulate and guide innovation in public and private policies, programs and projects.
   
• Capacity-building of actors of poverty and inequality reduction policies, programs and projects, in a three-pronged strategy: communication and outreach activities; training on diverse aspects of technical assistance; and extensive networking and network coordination at the regional levell.
   
• Advocacy in decision-making processes that affect Latin American rural societies, and particularly marginalized rural groups. 

Central Approach and Main Themes

A diverse set of activities has enabled Rimisp to contribute to the formulation of a rural territorial development (RTD) approach being used as a conceptual framework in all our activities. RTD promotes simultaneous productive and institutional transformations of specific rural areas, targeted at reducing rural poverty. Productive transformation aims at linking - competitively and sustainably - the local economy with dynamic markets. Institutional development aims at stimulating coordinated action among local actors and with external agents, as well as substantively changing the formal and informal rules that perpetuate the exclusion of the rural poor from the processes and benefits of productive transformations.

Rimisp currently focuses on four themes that are critical for Rural Territorial Development to make a concrete difference in the lives of the rural poor:

• Access to dynamic markets for small farmers and rural entrepreneurs examines the transformations of such markets and their effects on the poor, as well as the conditions and capacities that the poor need to enable them to ‘cooperate to compete’ in these markets.
  
• New rural social movements and local governance looks at the relationships between new social movements (of indigenous peoples, of environmentalists, of land claims, etc.) and the organizations and institutions that shape local governance in rural societies.
  
• Non-farm rural employment and incomes focuses on the incentives and capacities that would allow the rural poor to benefit from new employment opportunities. These new opportunities are derived from changes in the preferences and demands of citizens in general and or urban consumers in particular.
  
• Social learning for rural change requires strengthening multi-stakeholder networks and experiential learning processes starting with critical reflection about creative and effective poverty reduction and rural development experiences to stimulate and support innovation in public and private policies, programs and projects.

Rimisp has also significant experience with other related critical issues:

• Rural economic organizations
  
• Technical assistance services for small farmers
  
• Financial rural services
  
• Development of indigenous peoples
  
• Farming systems research and development
  
• Food security

Partners and Collaborators

In designing and implementing our activities, we work closely with private and public organizations representative of those we want to reach out to, and influence with the results of our work: the individuals, groups and organizations that with their practice and action, or with their ideas and thinking are contributing effectively to conceptualizing and implementing significant transformation processes in Latin American rural societies.

In the last five years, for example, Rimisp has worked in collaboration with some 117 private and public organizations, active at all levels - from local to global.  These include: Development NGOs; Research NGOs; Universities; National Governments; Sub-National Governments; Producers Organizations; Bilateral Organizations; Multilateral Organizations; and Consulting Firms.

The total value of Rimisp’s portfolio of active projects (2005) is of $5.96 million USD, corresponding to 43 projects financed through grants and service contracts. In 2005, our principal donors were the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Inter-Church Organization for Development Cooperation (ICCO, Netherlands), the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada), the Ford Foundation and New Zealand’s International Aid & Development Agency (NZAID).