Can Anything Good Come out of Agriculture?

I remember back then as a little boy in the village, going to the farm with my father after school was such a hectic task for me. My father was a cassava farmer; he also had a large cocoa plantation which he inherited from his father. I hated farming and everything that had to do with. But that was our only source of livelihood, where my father got money to take care of us. We were five boys and two girls and each had a task to do on the farmland. Every holiday my friends visited the cities and returned to our envy with ‘new things’, while I spent my holiday with my siblings on the farmland. And when I did anything wrong, my punishment then was to be in the farm house for many days. Those were years of ‘baptism’ in farming. And I vowed never to take to farming after my university degree because it used as tool to reprimand us and it was such a hard labour.

Many years after I moved to the city centre to complete my secondary and university education.  Upon graduation from the university, I discovered a huge population of unemployed youths with no source of livelihood. And many were university graduates. In 2010, I attended a seminar on youth empowerment in Lagos, Nigeria and to my dismay it was on agriculture. The seminar highlighted the potentials in agriculture as a source of livelihood, especially for unemployed graduates. But because of my experience back in the village, I never saw any potential in agriculture; because the farmers I knew were poor and it was a lot of hard work.

But the ‘baptism’ I had back in the village as a little boy prepared me for the task ahead, which I so much cherish now. In 2011, I started an initiative called Bonifab Nigeria/farmides Nigeria. And over the years we have been able to empower more than 400 youths and a thousand indirectly along the agriculture value chain. This was documented and published as part of my submission to the Global landscape conference held in Warsaw, Poland in November, 2013. The submission can be found at www.landscape.org/youth (youth submission, part 4 number 52).  As a member of YPARD since 2013, the platform has given me the privilege to network and meet with youths of like mind across Africa and rest of the world.  

My current research and professional works have consistently focused on youth engagement in agriculture, agricultural transformation and rural development issues and in line with the theme for GCARD3 . For these reasons, I have intensively interacted with farmers, stakeholders, and scientists from various disciplines and cultural backgrounds. The main objective of my initiative is to advocate agriculture as a sector that has the potentials to create millions of jobs for the unemployed youth population in Nigeria and Africa. The initiative also assesses the challenges confronting these youths and what they perceive as their major constraints in agribusiness. Results show the backward image and perception of agriculture amongst youth, the formulation and implementation of policies at both national and local levels that are not youth inclusive; and this borders on governance.

Some donors, particularly since the “Arab springs” of 2011 on why youth discontentment and unemployment were important factors; emphasized the importance of specifically addressing challenges and constraints faced by youth engaging in remunerative economics opportunities in agriculture and rural development. Nonetheless, as young men and women constitute a high and growing percentage of the population in sub Saharan Africa, it is increasingly recognized that the development of approaches tailored to specific needs of young people in ARD is important. Involving youth in agricultural development and decision making processes is crucial to ensuring sustainable development in Africa and framing this within the context of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) and entrepreneurship provide a valuable dimension to the discourse of agricultural modernization and prosperity. Agriculture has the potentials to create millions of jobs for the unemployed youth population in Africa. Poverty reduction and food security depend on a vibrant commercial agriculture sector that includes youth. Agriculture value chains are rife with opportunities for entrepreneurial engagement; to provide critical goods and services to rural populations seeking stronger linkages to input and output markets. Since agriculture is the predominant source of livelihood for the poor, youth agriculture-drive growth offers young people the most straightforward means of escaping hunger and poverty. If agriculture in Africa is to be transformed to achieve food security, to drive economic growth and improve living standards, Africa must take advantage of youth in agriculture to boost the entire value chain. 

This blog post is part of the GCARD3 Youth blogpost applications. The content, structure and grammar is at the discretion of the author only.