IPARD is an EU pre-accession program for agriculture and rural development for the period 2007-2013, and diversification is complementing or expanding the production or sales range by including new products and services that are different from the previous ones. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the contribution of the pre-accession IPARD program (Measure 302) to the development of non-agricultural activities in rural areas of the Republic of Croatia and to analyze the type of investments made with the funds of this fund to determine the fulfillment of one of the basic objectives of the program, namely retention of rural population areas, preserving the existing and opening up new jobs. The underlying hypothesis is that measure 302 of the IPARD program has fulfilled its basic objective - retention of rural population, preservation of existing and creating new jobs. The work is based on the research and presentation of the state of the natural, social and economic levels of the rural area before and after the IPARD program focused on agriculture and tourism as the most important economic sector of the rural area. Methods used in this paper were: secondary research method, comparative method, descriptive method and analytical method. The results of the research show a strong depopulation of highly rural counties, consequently, the reduction in the number of employees, which suggests that rural areas are abandoned by educated and working people. Also, the reported results of the applications by sectors and counties and the structure of users indicate that only a small part of the rural area had real benefit of the IPARD program. The conclusion is that the purpose of the IPARD program or measure 302 is not fully met and that the goal of retention and return of people to rural areas of the Republic of Croatia unfortunately has not been achieved, except partly in tourism-developed counties (Istarska and Primorsko-goranska).