Creating jobs for rural youth in agricultural value chains

needs of young people. These include different approaches for different classes of youth; helping young people understand and respond to markets; making youth aware of job opportunities in agriculture; building the capacities of young people; facilitating their access to finance and land; and building social capital and networks.

The recent CTA workshop on ‘facilitating next-generation ACP agriculture through youth entrepreneurship, job creation and digitalisation’ identified seven critical success factors for successful rural entrepreneurship and job creation: access by youth to investment and finance, scalable approaches and models that can be taken up, enabling policy environments for youth, agriculture that is attractive to youth, access by youth to markets, business models that work, and access to a pool of appropriate skills, capacities and knowledge and ways to grow these. This brief by Ji-Yeun Rim and Tony Nsanganira argues that youth-inclusive investments to modernise the agricultural sector will unleash its huge potential, offer attractive employment opportunities and create a level playing field for rural girls and boys. It sets out several youth-inclusive approaches that will help agricultural value chain development programmes meet the

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IntroductionIn many developing countries, most young people live in rural areas and their number will continue to increase in the least developed countries. Rural transformation

and green industrialisation is not happening fast enough to create enough decent employment in rural areas, so the vast majority of rural youth are turning their backs on rural life and agriculture and migrating to cities. However, the majority of rural youth are poorly educated and will have difficulty finding decent work opportunities in cities and urban areas.

Increasing responsible and youth-inclusive investments to modernise the agricultural sector will unleash its huge potential, offer attractive employment opportunities and create a level playing field for rural girls and boys.

Applying youth-sensitive approaches in agri-food value chain projectsThe latest report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the Future of Rural Youth (OECD, 2018) reviews 10 initiatives in Africa aimed at creating youth employment along agri-food value chains to identify successful youth-sensitive approaches. Most of the projects target disadvantaged rural youth with primary- or secondary-level education

Key steps in developing a youth-sensitive approach to job creation

nProfile youth for accurate targeting of development efforts.

nEngage youth in developing an understanding of the market

nMake youth aware of the potential of agriculture as a job sector

nBuild youth capacity through peer-to-peer learning and mentoring

nProvide training in basic literacy and numeracy and life skills

nFacilitate access to finance and land through public-private partnerships

nBuild social capital

And make sure that these efforts are part of an integrated development framework.

and all of the initiatives combine local market opportunities and skills development for youth. This brief outlines factors and conditions for success that can help support the design or upscaling of agri-food value chain programmes.

Profiling rural youth

Youth is not a monolithic, uniform group – the challenges and constraints they face differ between age groups, ethnicities, education levels and many other factors. Thus, first and foremost, agri-food projects that are youth-specific must understand the heterogeneity of this population group. This means profiling them by age groups (e.g. 15–17, 18–24, 25–29), ethnicity (e.g. indigenous groups), disability, gender, education and skills level, social capital, access to land and finance, prevailing social norms in the community, etc. This profiling will help identify different bottlenecks for each group.

Understanding the market

Young people may not be familiar with how to carry out a market study and to select products of high potential value to develop a business around. Rural areas may also have limited access to markets. Agri-food value chain development programmes for youth should involve young people in the market study stage and have them draw up a list of potential activities in their communities and regions that they see themselves capable of doing and that at the same time represent potential growth sectors with access to markets.

Making agriculture lucrative

Many successful programmes aimed at integrating young people into agricultural activities have a strong awareness-raising component. Young rural people commonly underestimate the potential of agriculture and value addition as a job. Campaigns should include information about market requirements, product standards, knowledge needed, innovative tools and new production methods, but should also highlight successful agripreneurs as role models. Rural areas are limited in terms of access to market and infrastructure but opportunities exist in early

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“Youth is not a monolithic, uniform group – the challenges and constraints they face differ between age groups, ethnicities, education levels and many other factors.”

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value addition. For example, first-stage food processors (e.g. flour mills, beer breweries) are particularly relevant for creating jobs in rural areas because these agro-industries are more amenable to being located in small towns and rural areas than are enterprises in other sectors.

Capacity building through peer-to-peer learning and mentoring

Skills training and capacity building are common interventions for youth programmes. One of the methods that seems to be most effective among youth is peer-to-peer learning. Young people are more easily convinced by other young people. Peer-to-peer learning has proven effective when providing agricultural extension services, for example.

Involving local leaders and youth farmers can help change the mentality of rural youth through mentoring and coaching. Mentoring can happen through incubator approaches, where young farmers learn how to operate a business, or through regular meetings and interactions.

Training in basic literacy and numeracy and life skills

The majority of rural youth are early school dropouts and have low skills. Programmes that provide apprenticeship and on-the-job training opportunities for rural youth have proven to increase employability. Vocational training programmes must also consider teaching soft skills in addition to basic literacy and numeracy skills. Improving entrepreneurship skills, for example, entails training not only in business management but also in negotiation, leadership and team building (life skills).

“Joining farmers’ organisations or cooperatives helps young people gain trust and build solidarity with their peers, as well as facilitating access to quality inputs, services, financing and markets.”

Facilitating access to financial capital and land through public-private partnerships

Financial services in developing countries are commonly not adapted to the specific needs and constraints (e.g. lack of collateral and financial resources) of youth who may wish to start an activity in the agri-food sector. Furthermore, young people wishing to farm may not have access to land. Programmes aimed at helping young people engage in agriculture need to support their access to land (through cooperatives or community borrowed land), seed capital and basic equipment to get them started. A good example is the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Junior Farmer Field and Life Schools project in Tanzania (FAO, 2018a). The project collaborated with the Tanzania Federation of Cooperatives and local authorities to facilitate access of young people to cooperative land or village land. Linkages with cooperative unions and dedicated agricultural budgets from regional authorities facilitated youth access to finance.

Building social capital

Successful agricultural businesses rely on strong linkages with actors along the value chain. Young people usually have not yet built up such networks of contacts. Joining farmers’ organisations or cooperatives helps young people gain trust and build solidarity with their peers, as well as facilitating access to quality inputs, services, financing and markets. Agricultural cooperatives have proven to be an effective mechanism for engaging young people in agriculture and for increasing social capital and employment opportunities through on-farm and off-farm activities.

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“Governments will have to stimulate growth in wage employment in the productive sector in order to address the massive youth employment challenges. This will require greater investment in rural areas to tap into the comparative advantage of these areas and to support access to markets.”

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Adopting an integrated development frameworkNone of these initiatives can be successful and sustainable without enabling policies and comprehensive local development strategies. While youth entrepreneurship is a promising approach for certain young people with the right assets and attributes, the majority of youth seeking work will have to find wage jobs. Governments will have to stimulate growth in wage employment in the productive sector in order to address the massive youth employment challenges. This will require greater investment in rural areas to tap into the comparative advantage of these areas and to support access to markets. This will contribute to the creation of on-farm and off-farm wage employment.

One development framework that employs this approach is FAO’s Integrated Country Approach (ICA) (FAO, 2018b). This aims to enhance the employment content of national strategies, policies and programmes for agricultural and rural development in order to optimise the contribution of the sector to improving the quantity as well as the quality of rural jobs. ICA assists policy-makers, planners and development practitioners

in building more-integrated interventions for decent rural employment. In Uganda, for example, with the support of the ICA programme, the government developed a national strategy for youth in agriculture that focuses on understanding how to integrate rural youth along agricultural value chains and ensuring that youth employment issues are integrated into other strategic programmes.

In conclusionContinued growth in demand for value-added food and agricultural products in developing countries makes a strong business case to invest further in the development of agri-food value chains for domestic and regional markets. Unlocking this potential will require focused attention on what young people want as well as better provision of infrastructure and services and skills provision, especially in rural areas and for rural communities, through integrated development frameworks. Agricultural value chain development programmes need to apply a youth-employment lens and youth-sensitive approaches and purposefully set rural youth inclusion and decent employment as objectives.

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About the seriesCTA Technical Briefs document experience and learning in topical issues of interest to the ACP agricultural development community. They are intended as a practical guide for people involved in an issue professionally or for people with a strong interest in the topic.

Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural CooperationP.O. Box 380 – 6700 AJ Wageningen – The NetherlandsTel: +31 (0) 317 467 100 | E-mail: cta@cta.int | www.cta.int

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ReferencesFAO. 2018a. FAO’s Junior Farmer Field and Life Schools. [online]. Available at: https://bit.ly/2UnVvjd and http://www.fao.org/3/a-i1208e.pdf [Accessed 20 November 2018].

FAO. 2018b. FAO’s Integrated Country Approach (ICA) for decent rural employment. [online]. Available at: https://bit.ly/2MyKaKy [Accessed 20 November 2018].

OECD. 2018. The Future of Rural Youth in Developing Countries: Tapping the potential of local value chains. OECD Publishing, Paris. Available at: https://bit.ly/2Q6sri2 [Accessed 20 November 2018].

Photo creditsPages 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7 – MUIIS Project Uganda, Page 6 – Inoussa Maïga/Mediaprod

Authors

Ji-Yeun Rim leads work on youth at the OECD Development Centre. Between 2015 and 2018 she coordinated the EU-OECD Youth Inclusion project, which supported the development of national youth policies in nine developing countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Tony Roberto Nsanganira is the Youth Employment Specialist at the Regional Office for Africa of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). His role is to support FAO’s interventions in the area of reducing rural poverty, with focus on promoting decent rural youth employment in agriculture/agribusiness. He is a former Minister of State in charge of agriculture in the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources of the Republic of Rwanda.

This brief was created through a CTA-led process to document and share actionable knowledge on ‘what works’ for ACP agriculture. It capitalises on the insights, lessons and experiences of practitioners to inform and guide the implementation of agriculture for development projects.

A series of video recordings with participants gives personal perspectives on the issues raised during the workshop. See: https://bit.ly/2FROq7r

The products of the workshop can be found and downloaded at: https://bit.ly/2sRaSVH

Creating jobs for rural youth in agricultural value chains

Disclaimer This work has been made possible with the financial assistance of the European Union. However, the contents remain the sole responsibility of its author(s) and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of CTA, its co-publisher or the European Union, nor of any country or member State. The user should make his/her own evaluation as to the appropriateness of any statement, argument, experimental technique or method described in the work.

Copyright notice This work is the sole intellectual property of CTA and its co-publishers, and cannot be commercially exploited. CTA encourages its dissemination for private study, research, teaching and non-commercial purposes, provided that appropriate acknowledgement is made:

– of CTA’s copyright and EU financing, by including the name of the author, the title of the work and the following notice “© CTA 2019 EU financing”,

– and that CTA’s or its co-publishers’, and European Union’s endorsement of users’ views, products or services is not implied in any way, by including the standard CTA disclaimer.

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