Highlights

Worldwide, there are 1.2 billion young women and men between the ages of 15 and 24, 85 per cent of whom live in developing countries, often in rural areas. IFAD’s project portfolio includes a number of activities that focus explicitly on supporting rural youth, such as the establishment of young farmer clubs in Cambodia, business training in Vietnam and on Fiji, a youth employment programme in India, and a young professional programme in Afghanistan, if we look at the Asia and Pacific Region. Large portions of the population in IFAD’s partner countries are in the youth demographic – in Bangladesh the median age is 23.9 years, and in India half of the population is below 24 - making young women and men an important target group in all IFAD-supported projects.

Creating employment by supporting entrepreneurship: Young people often are confronted with a jobless market but have ideas for their own businesses. To give them the funds and capacity needed to turn these ideas into reality, the Finance for Enterprise Development and Employment Creation (FEDEC) project that is working in all areas of Bangladesh provided women and men with access to micro-entrepreneur loans as well as training on business management and technology aspects. Loans averaging USD 1000 supported a broad variety of businesses, ranging from producing cooking tools made of recycled aluminum, to producing clothes, to food processing. Worth noting is that an average of 1.5 additional jobs were created for every entrepreneur supported with a loan. So supporting small entrepreneurs with financial resources and capacity creates new opportunities and perspectives for others as well.

Worldwide, there are 1.2 billion young women and men between the ages of 15 and 24, 85 per cent of whom live in developing countries, often in rural areas. IFAD’s project portfolio includes a number of activities that focus explicitly on supporting rural youth, such as the establishment of young farmer clubs in Cambodia, business training in Vietnam and on Fiji, a youth employment programme in India, and a young professional programme in Afghanistan, if we look at the Asia and Pacific Region. Large portions of the population in IFAD’s partner countries are in the youth demographic – in Bangladesh the median age is 23.9 years, and in India half of the population is below 24 - making young women and men an important target group in all IFAD-supported projects.

Last week, IFAD’s Strategy and Knowledge Management Department organized a meeting to discuss        the question “Rural Youth – Why should it be a priority?” The meeting made clear that the answer is quite straightforward: today’s generation of young people  is the largest in history. In fact, youth make up one fifth of the global population, with shares growing in South-Central Asia and Sub-Sahara Africa.  As the President of IFAD, Kanayo Nwanze, writes in his viewpoint, “Sheer force of numbers means that we urgently need to harness the power and creativity of young adults on every continent. (…) With world population set to peak at over 9 billion in 2050 – and projections that food production will need to rise by 70 per cent – creating opportunities for young farmers and workers in rural areas is crucial.” 

Rural young people must play vital roles in their communities as tomorrow’s teachers, farmers and businessmen or women. But currently, many rural youth have difficulties finding work or feel that they cannot gain sufficient income from farming, and they are therefore leaving their rural homes for urban areas in record numbers.

 

A large number of IFAD-supported projects work to address this situation, to create perspectives and opportunities for young people in rural areas. As a lead implementation agency of the System Wide Action Plan on Youth , IFAD is particularly committed to increasing access to assets and services by young entrepreneurs in rural and urban areas (measure 3.3), as our SKM colleagues Rosemary Vargas-Lundius and David Suttie reported.

 

In Bangladesh, for example, IFAD is working closely with local institutions to do just that, supporting entrepreneurship and building the business capacity of farmers in several ways:

• Creating employment by supporting entrepreneurship: Young people often are confronted with a jobless market but have ideas for their own businesses. To give them the funds and capacity needed to turn these ideas into reality, the Finance for Enterprise Development and Employment Creation (FEDEC) project that is working in all areas of Bangladesh provided women and men with access to micro-entrepreneur loans as well as training on business management and technology aspects. Loans averaging USD 1000 supported a broad variety of businesses, ranging from producing cooking tools made of recycled aluminum, to producing clothes, to food processing. Worth noting is that an average of 1.5 additional jobs were created for every entrepreneur supported with a loan. So supporting small entrepreneurs with financial resources and capacity creates new opportunities and perspectives for others as well.

• Changing the mind-sets: Most rural youth are involved in agriculture, or as Felicity Procter, International Development Expert, put it in her presentation last week: “For many millions of rural youth there is no other alternative other than a livelihood in agriculture.” However, many do not perceive farming as a sufficient means to support themselves. The Rural Enterprise Development Component under the Market and Infrastructure Development Project in Charland Regions (MIDPCR) supported smallholders in turning their farming into a business, bringing in new technologies and increasing their incomes. Following a systematic approach to value chain development, the project brought relevant actors (suppliers, producers, buyers, regulators) together before the actual crop production started, which allowed young farmers to identify market demand, input shortages and technical assistance needs. Through these meetings and workshops, farmers strengthened their linkage with private sector actors and adjusted their production to market needs. In addition, farmers participated in marketing workshops where they learned to approach farming as a business undertaking, including the nuts and bolts of bookkeeping, market analysis and marketing. Young farmers who had encountered technical issues that kept them from increasing their production or adjusting to market demand received targeted technical training in new technologies and production methods from private sector partners . After three years of implementation, the income of participating farmers had increased by up to 300 per cent.

The meeting on rural youth last week showed the importance of involving young people in our work,???? and first steps have already been taken at the corporate and the project level. To summarize the very rich and detailed discussions from the afternoon would be almost impossible – the tweets (#ifadyouth) will give you an impression – but a few points that I took away from the event were:

• Proctor, F. J. and V. Lucchesi (2012) Small-scale farming and youth in an era of rapid rural change. IIED/HIVOS, London/The Hague
• Youth Guidance Note aimed at enabling development practitioners/project staff to mainstream youth into rural development programmes
• Youth Policy Brief for policy-makers with practical advice for addressing rural youth issues