The purpose of this symposium was to create a forum where the government and the donor community can brainstorm and consult on issues regarding Ethiopia's rural development strategy including ways of scaling up successful investments. The focus of the discussions was on the following broad areas:

• marketing and productivity
• rural infrastructure and market town development
• rural finance and how to deal with risk, as well as
• Irrigation, water management and environment.

Discussion points cutting across these themes were: the role of the state versus the private sector's; infrastructure policy; whether to focus on rural growth in rural farms versus rural towns, and the balance between the two; non-farm growth; liberalizing markets (especially fertilizer markets), the role of cooperatives, and ways of mitigating and smoothing risks.