Network of Rural Development is a platform for mutual learning, exchange of knowledge and experience among organizations and institutions involved in the formation and implementation of rural development policy, programs and projects. These entities seek to continuously improve the quality, effectiveness, efficiency and impact of available resources to support agriculture and rural population in the interests of all citizens and sustainable rural development throughout the country. The network builds up human and social capital to achieve this goal, combining different competencies, skills, qualifications and contacts.
Network of Rural Development obtains common vision of Ukraine’s rural area and has a desire to contribute its development. This vision is following: picturesque rural areas which offer a wide range of opportunities for employment and income earning, improving the quality of life for the citizens and for sustainable use and protection of fertile Ukrainian soil, natural resources, traditional rural families.
The network focuses its efforts on creating a new ideological platform of domestic agricultural and rural development as public policy and national priority, not in words but in real actions. The network will offer concrete steps and measures by common efforts in order to demonstrate practical examples of how to achieve shared values. The success stories will be build based on positive experience gained on the ground in the rural area, farmers enterprises and rural communities and in foreign countries.
The network will create public information and analytical platform by combined efforts of its members that will really reflect the interests of rural residents. This platform will summarize these interests and inform the highest governmental institutions aimed to contribute the realization of their interests in the process of formation and implementation of Ukraine’s social and economic policy.
The objectives of the Network in the initial phase include:
- advocacy work based on analyzing draft legal acts, orders and decisions of governmental institutions in compliance with the interests of farmers and rural population, preparing recommendations and suggestions to incorporate these interests in legal acts; defending the need to support rural development as a national priority and major public policy objectives;
- collecting, summarizing and popularizing information about successful practices on local level, operating in different parts of Ukraine and promoting the objectives of rural development (economic, social, environmental), formation of recommendations to support and disseminate these practices.
- preparation of legislative initiatives, drafting of laws and legal regulations, strategies and programs of rural development;
- dissemination of rural development knowledge among government officials and municipal authorities, civil society organizations, business community and among wide spectrum of the population both urban and rural with the purpose to attract all of them to the activities and actions aimed for developing the rural economy and the rural areas.
The objectives of the network will be specified with the acquisition of experience and the network expanding, but the main goal will remain the same: to facilitate formation and implementation of the effective rural development public policy, drafting effective programs and development projects in rural areas for rural residents.