I am Gebhard Eshumba, Senior Youth Officer for Rural Youth Development Programme, Directorate of Youth Development in the Ministry of Sports Youth and National Service in Namibia.

I had great opportunity to participate in the workshop on Strengthening Capacities of Youth to Carry Out and Benefit from Responsible Agricultural Investment in SADC Countries from 20th – 23rd March, 2018. The three-day workshop was organised by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa (ITOCA) as implementing partner for the activities. Four (4) SADC countries, Namibia, Malawi, South Africa, and Mozambique participated in the workshop and participants from the same country were grouped together to work on the assessment tool for their country.

Rapid Capacity Assessment Tool

The aim of the tool is to help interested practitioners to carry out a multi-stakeholder assessment of existing and needed capacities to engage and empower youth to carry out and benefit from the responsible investment in agriculture and food systems as per respective countries. The tool is designed to support the application of the Committee on world Food System principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and food system (CFS-RAI) with a particular focus on principle four “Engage and empower the Youth”. Other principles were also considered in the development of the assessment tool of each country. The 10 Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems are:

Dimension of capacity development addressed by the assessment tools

The discussions were full of valuable and enriching information as the Namibian participants comes from different sectors such as:

Picture 2: Namibian Participants working on the Assessment tool for Namibia 

 The workshop was also an eye-opener for all Namibians, as we were working on the assessment tool, we realize that there are so many things happening in the agricultural sectors and the youth are not fully engaged. We have realized that there lack of coordination and corroborations between different stakeholders that contribute to youth engagement in agriculture. Young people are not involved in some policy development as results they feel left out to participate fully in the agriculture value chains.

Photos contributed by Mercy Moy- ITOCA.