The youth population in Africa is vast, with nearly a billion people under the age of 35 from a total of 1.4 billion in 2020. Despite a growing GDP, economic growth across Sub-Saharan Africa is not sufficient to absorb the young labor force entering the market each year.
A quarter of young people remain not engaged in education, employment, or training and only half are employed. Despite common misconceptions, educated youths are increasingly attracted to agriculture due to opportunities in smart farming and value-added activities. Governments, education and training providers, and financial institutions need to support these opportunities with appropriate policies, education, and financing options. Together this can help ensure young people’s opportunities grow together with the agri-food sector.
Young people’s engagement in agriculture offers a multifaceted range of benefits for various stakeholders. For the youth, participation in agriculture provides opportunities for economic empowerment through agribusiness ventures. Governments can benefit from young people’s engagement involvement in agricultural service provision and input supply through enhanced farmer access to quality, effective advisory services with improved traceability of agricultural inputs. The enthusiasm and knowledge of young women and men enable them to act as local champions for change, promoting sustainable agricultural practices while supporting farmers to adopt modern technologies including digital tools.
Society can reap the rewards of reduced unemployment, strengthen community development, and increase social cohesion through youth engagement in agriculture.
Health Promotion and Rights Watch Uganda old ambition for young women and men is to empower them as agents of agricultural transformation. Our youth engagement initiatives focus on enhancing their technical, entrepreneurial, and leadership skills to foster agribusiness success and strengthen youth-led & youth-serving agricultural organizations; facilitating access to critical resources such as finance and expanding market opportunities for youth-produced goods and services; leveraging digital technologies in empowering youth to lead change and innovation in the sector while strengthening their advocacy and communication skills.
We continuously aim to build strategic partnerships that amplify youth voices in advocacy for policies and investments that support their meaningful engagement and influence in agriculture while fostering a positive perception of the sector.
We have forged strategic partnerships with farmer cooperatives, government entities, schools, private sector agribusinesses, and off-takers to facilitate meaningful youth engagement in agriculture in Uganda. These collaborations have played a crucial role in providing youth with opportunities for training, mentorship, linkages for input and market access as well as resource mobilization. Under our internship programs, our youth engagement initiatives have focused on empowering youth in agricultural service provision and education.
Over 100 young people have received training and support to establish and run their own agribusinesses, offering valuable advisory, pest management and input supply services to farmers.
To facilitate ongoing learning and remote support for youth in agribusiness, we have recently signed memorandum of Understanding with Hunga Agro Center. We are looking forward to learning how young people can effectively engage with all the self-study modules at the center and how it can be used as part of our scaling strategy.
Our activities have been taking place to enhance agricultural training and agribusiness development support for over 450 young people. These initiatives focus on integrating young people into significant roles within the agri-food sector. By combining technical plant health knowledge with business, and financial literacy training, and facilitating access to markets for their services and produce, we aim to empower youth to start micro-enterprises and support smallholder farmers. In 2024, over 130 of the participants completed physical trainings designed to understand the scale and diversity of the income generation activities, and the reach and impact the young people were having on local farmers.
Our programs target young people aged 18-35, aligning with the African Union Youth Charter but expanding the UN’s typical age range of 15-24. Recognizing the diversity within this age group, which varies by gender, social background, urban or rural location, education and skills level, the need for tailored communication is clear, with creatively named interventions to engage all eligible participants effectively. This approach aims to address the unique circumstances of each subgroup within the youth demographic.