Youths in agric sector: Challenges and successes

IN the recent past, a high number of youths have graduated from the institutions of higher learning and have flooded the job market, thus an increase in the rate of unemployment. These youths are, therefore, forced to take up any opportunity that comes their way despite their educational background.

These youths exist in both the rural and urban settings all over the world. In the past years, most of those from rural backgrounds have migrated to towns looking for white collar jobs, others remaining behind in the rural areas taking up casual jobs. Not all those who move to towns are lucky to secure a job and they end up back in their rural villages.

Challenges:

Traditionally, the attitude of youths towards agriculture was that it was meant for the poor. We can come up with the agricultural sector development support programme (ASDSP) for the youths. Many youths have raised the following challenges: High cost of investment in agriculture, challenges in accessing lines of credit, negative attitude towards agriculture, lack of market, lack of knowledge in marketing, poor infrastructure, agriculture as a labour intensive activity, youths are dynamic in nature, lack of land/space ownership and lack of water for irrigation (common to horticultural farmers).

One of the challenges that is so clear among the small-scale farmers is the market for agricultural products. For example, in the poultry value chain, constraints hindering market development for indigenous poultry products include: mismatch between supply and demand which results in price discrepancies, supply is sometimes not reliable.

This is a specific concern for hotels and institutions whose plans are based on regular supply, poor packaging or no packaging at all, no branding and product diversification, no market segmentation and the existing groups do not co-operate with each other to optimise the supply chain and bring down transaction costs, there is not even information sharing on supply opportunities.

Successes:

Through collaboration of various stakeholders dealing with farmers and youths, capacity building interventions can be conducted on over 500 youth farmers. These trainings and linking the small-scale farmers can deal with some of the challenges. This will see even youths residing in urban areas succeeding in agribusiness. It can be made possible through mapping assets (identifying the most readily available resources) and how they can be commercially utilised.

The youths and women trained under the ASDSP will not only produce, but also target to venture into other opportunities in the agricultural value chain such as being marketers, retailer/wholesaler, creating value-added products or even offering storage facilities. This will create more opportunities for the youths as opposed to bringing about competition at the production level that may lead to overproduction, creating market saturation.

Levison