Many of the world’s most disadvantaged youth live in rural communities whose weak economies offer them few possibilities to obtain decent employment —and their numbers are growing. Of the more than 300 million young people poised to enter the labor force over the next 30 years, 195 million live in rural areas.
The need to create viable economic opportunities to engage rural youth is urgent. At the same time, the current youth bulge offers an unprecedented opportunity for practitioners and governments to harness the energy, motivation, and innovation of these young people to bolster economic development and social change, while addressing pressing food security needs.
For rural youth in particular, new business creation in the agriculture sector can present an important and viable opportunity to earn a decent living. The International Youth Foundation’s (IYF’s) YouthMap program, a multi-country initiative aimed at better understanding and addressing the challenges facing Africa’s young people, found evidence that agriculture’s position as a growth sector in many African nations could be a worthwhile option to provide young people opportunities within the value chain.
That said, although most rural youth are already engaged in informal agriculture in some way, they may not see it as an attractive or viable career option given such obstacles as geographic isolation, unfriendly land use policies, poor infrastructure, high transport costs, and/or unavailable agricultural inputs. Nonetheless, increasing meaningful employment opportunities along the agricultural value chain can give rural youth the chance to engage in productive work and overcome these challenges. An often overlooked area of opportunity is the ‘green economy’ (e.g., solar energy, organic agriculture), which has the potential to become a growth sector for rural youth.
This Best Practice Note offers learnings for how youth-serving organizations can effectively create holistic programming around rural youth entrepreneurship based on IYF’s experiences in carrying out a youth agribusiness project in Senegal.
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