Moving forward on youth inclusiveness in agricultural transformation: report from two December meetings in the Netherlands

Published on 20 December 2016 on the Dutch-based Food & Business Knowledge Platform (F&BKP), this blog post considers the do’s and don’ts when working with youth. It is based on two meetings on youth inclusiveness in agricultural transformation held in December in the Netherlands. The first, the Vijverberg session, part of the foodFIRST series, brought together a wide range of experts on 7 December. The lunch meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 8 December 2016 focused the discussion more on policy implication. 

The key presenter of the meetings, Jim Sumberg from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), gave a speech to counter some of the current dominant discourses of youth in agriculture. In his speech, Sumberg argued for more critical engagement in policy and practice upon processes of agricultural transformation, youth un- and underemployment, and youth entrepreneurship. For example, aiming for agricultural transformation at the farmer level versus the system level (cooperation between larger units) determines the kind of programs that can be successful in creating opportunities for youth. Relating to this, he argued that donors and other development acotors need to distinguish between structural problems which account for a larger group of people, and truly young-specific problems where young people are being systematically and institutionally disadvantaged or discriminated against. Sumberg argued that too many programmes are focusing on youth as the entrepreneur and entrepreneurship as the key to employment generation. The assumption is that this will spur agricultural transformation and create opportunities for youth within that process, however it has yet to be seen whether this strategy will be successful. Youth are often targeted, as individual, isolated economic agents, while young people are, for the most part, deeply embedded and even dependent upon networks of family and social relations. Therefore, Sumberg called for a social systems approach. 

Next, the insights from a quick-scan study by the F&BKP, INCLUDE Platform and AgriProFocus were presented to illustrate the discussion with country-specific insights. Find the presentation here. This study aimed to assess available evidence in relation to African young people’s engagement with agriculture, and to analyze how this is reflected in current policy and programing in Ghana, Mali and Kenya.