Ensuring better rural futures with the youth

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?” Chuck Palahniuk once wondered. For me, these sentiments come to mind when I look at GCARD3’s GCARD3 5 key themes and of interest being the third and fifth themes all of which seek to secure the future. 

I believe it all started when the “youth in agriculture” started being taken lightly. Teachers started using agriculture as a punitive measure for students who erred without thinking of the implications it would have. I remember as a small child how I loved to accompany my grandmother to the farm and I could happily plough alongside her for hours without tiring. But this changed when I started schooling; we were only made to work on the school farm whenever we erred. And what did this make us think of our parents who worked on the farms to earn our daily bread? Our little brains told us that for them, it was a punishment from God and hence our dislike for farming.

This dislike for farming has in turn put the future of agriculture and that of rural areas that depend on it at stake. And now with the surging global population and the declining number of farmers, one is only left to wonder, who will feed the world? We need the youth in agriculture now than ever to ensure it’s well fed in future. On average, the ordinary farmer is aged above 50yrs leaving the question, where will we be in the next decade when they are old and too weak to work on the farm? We need to get back our youth into farming to safeguard our future and food security. Young people are needed to proactively contribute to innovative and sustainable agriculture development.

As such, it calls for furtherance of efforts being made by GCARD3 to promote agriculture. It’s focus on re-aligning research needs and priorities with countries’ own development needs and national processes and with sustainable development goals should prioritize the youth component. Its key theme on research should focus on innovations that make agriculture and rural areas attractive to the youth. Personally, I am also contributing to this though my research on what should be done to increase youth involvement in Agricultural development in rural areas. This’ because youth participation in agriculture is a key ingredient for future development and thus a serious development gap if lacking.

In the youth and such initiatives as GCARD3’s, lies the future of our continent and thus a promise and not a threat. If we don’t plan to invest in agriculture which is the backbone of many African economies, we are planning to fail. It’s never too late to secure the future of our continent with the youth.     

Hudson Shiraku is a director at McAkiba Limited – a small company, a farmer, an environmentalist, a blogger, a writer and a Programme assistant at the Biovision Africa Trust (BvAT). Given his experience and knowledge, he has a strong flair of social media and writing skills which he has gained through blogging. He has experience working on development projects with rural communities on Sustainable Agriculture in Kenya. Although his skill set is vast, his greatest expertise revolves in the worlds of project management, ICT for Development, content creation and management and creative writing. Just the person you need at the GCARD3 Global Event; see you there. 

This blog post is part of the GCARD3 Youth blogpost applications. The content, structure and grammar is at the discretion of the author only.