Unicef provides digital gateway for Ndlambe youth to learn agriculture
For the next five weeks, 50 young people from Ndlambe will be exploring the world of agriculture using the revolutionary Yoma digital platform and other high-tech tools.
Half of the participants in the pilot programme are 17-24-year-olds from Bathurst and Port Alfred; the other 25 are from Alexandria.
The five-week programme of the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) aims to introduce participants to agriculture through a combination of digital tools such as Crop Observe, and face-to-face engagement with farmers.
The introductory segment for the Port Alfred/Bathurst group was held at StendenSA. When Talk of the Town visited, they were working in groups of five, each group with a tablet, and getting to know the Crop Observe app. While they were busy with that, TOTT chatted to the three facilitators, Kristina Zettel, who works for Unicef and is based in Pretoria; Camila Haux, who is from Cape Town-based RLabs and champions the Yoma app; and community development manager at StendenSA, Mzameli Dikeni.
“We’re trying to create a learning pathway that combines agricultural and digital skills,” Zettel explained.
Farming is not only critical for food security, it is also core to SA’s economic growth. According to the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy, the agricultural sector is the fastest growing sector of the economy.
While SA’s total GDP grew by 0.6% during the second quarter of 2023, agricultural GDP grew by 4.2%.
So agriculture is clearly important for the nation, but is farming cool enough for young people?
“We think it is,” Zettel said. “And we think that by introducing it to them through state-of-the-art user-friendly technology, it will swing that way.
“The average age of a farmer is 65 and that’s a big issue,” she said. “Something has to be done.” Haux said the Yoma app also featured agriculture-related tasks and activities that the group will engage with.
Talk of the Town plans to catch up with some of the participants at the end of the five weeks.
About the Yoma app
Imagine being rewarded for learning through doing stuff that matters to you.
That’s the reality for users of the revolutionary Yoma app. Launched in July 2020, Yoma is a digital marketplace where youth can build their futures by actively engaging in social impact tasks as well as learning to earning opportunities. Personal growth is incentivised with digital tokens that can be swapped for digital services or physical goods. Young people’s successes are recorded on a verifiable digital CV, for sharing with potential employers