YPARD gets involved in the discussion on 'Engaging youth in agriculture'

The session on 'engaging young people' brought out different people to share their experiences on how they engage young people in the agrifood sector in Africa. These are some of the ideas that came out of this session (to which YPARD also shared their experiences) during the Future Agricultures conference on youth, farming and the agrifood sector in Africa.

When we are talking about engaging youth in agriculture, where do we want them to be engaged?  What type of role are we thinking about for them?  If we clarify this from the outset we may have better strategies for engaging with them.  Some examples or strategies of positive engagement from the presentations were:

• Building on viable groups based on existing farmer organisations
• Harmonizing NGO interventions with national youth policies
• A network for young people that provides them with services and uses their feedback to advocate on their behalf
• Common interest groups (CIGs) in Kenya composed of youth.  The youth involved in these groups had higher productivity in their agricultural outputs that those working independently. 

We must understand that there are very varied ways of engaging youth around the world which is also different between different disciplines.  It is very difficult to draw out trends, although access to funding came out strongly in most of the presentations and the need to work with young people to help them find and make use of these opportunities. 

We must also be careful in how we choose to try to feed these methods of engagement into policy as the methods chosen may only meet the needs of a very specific group of youth and cannot be seen as ‘solving the youth issue’.