One area that almost everyone had picked up interest in this year’s Africa Green Revolution Forum 2019 held in Accra, Ghana was the participation of the youth in the Agricultural Sector. IFAD’s Rural Development Report 2019 (RDR) titled Creating Opportunities for Rural Youth suggests that Africa has the youngest and fastest-growing population in the world. According to the reports not only is Africa home to a larger proportion of young people but its speculated to increase by 2050 to over 350 million youth.
This, therefore, calls for the need to addressing the widespread poverty and provide employment and livelihood opportunities for the large and growing number of young people who are poor and concentrated in rural areas.
At the forum, I could see a number of young people who are doing some fantastic works such as Isaac Sesi the Co-Founder of Sesi Technologies which is a company that develops affordable technologies to help African farmers increase productivity and maximize losses. His company has a mission of helping reduce poverty and hunger in Africa by leveraging technology to tackle some of the biggest problems across the Agriculture value chain. Isaac is indeed an inspiration to the youth of Africa. He and many other young people have shown that digital technologies could be developed here in Africa by African to bring solutions to African problems.
The likes of Abdulsalam Toheed (CEO, Farmignite) who is also a young Agro-entrepreneur whose enterprise gives everyone the opportunity to fund a farm, empower our small-scale farmers and share in their returns. They also help you establish your personal farm and to get access to practical training and resources to enable you to thrive.
The works of such great minds tell us that the African youth have what it takes to succeed and that the youth are ready to be partakers of the Green Revolution. With the needed support from sponsors and stakeholders, we can have a lot of the youth now venturing into the Agric sector.
For me, I have come to learn the going into agribusiness is not just farming but also being able to provide certain services that will increase production and supply of food to be able to meet the demands of people. If we will grow digital for agricultural transformation then the youth must take the lead.