In May, the Association for Vertical Farming (AVF) completed a successful, and first ever, international Vertical Farming Innovation Award, sponsored by Illumitex and powered by Thought For Food. The #AVFaward brought in 100 design concepts from 25 countries, leading to one submission winning the US$5,000 Innovation Prize for Vertical Farming 2016.
In 2015-2016, a team of researchers conducted in-depth interviews with over 100 young men and women living in the rural dryland area of Midelt, Morocco. The goal was to obtain youth perspectives on the realities, challenges and aspirations of life in drylands and opportunities for making a living off agriculture.
The first half of 2016 is gone and as we usher in the other, YPARD10Years celebrations follow us.
What do chocolate, salami, tomato sauce, and fried sage leaves all have in common? To start, they are all being made in Sicily. They are food products that have been around for ages, sometimes stemming from family recipes (tomato sauce) and other times adapted to fit local ingredients (beer made with hints of basil) and they are being revived in parts of rural Sicily to share with the rest of the globe. Each product and producer had its own story, and students of the Food Innovation Summer School Mediterraneo recently had a chance to discover their rich stories.
A message by Richard Thomas, Director, CGIAR Research Program on Dryland Systems
"Today, young people worldwide are celebrating the World Youth Skills Day, which was designated as an international day in 2014 by the United Nations General Assembly in order to raise awareness about the importance of investing in youth skills development.
World Youth Skills Day (15 July) serves as an opportunity to highlight the importance of youth skills development. The UNCCD and its partners recognize and support projects and initiatives that seek to equip young people with tools and resources that will develop their capacity in sustainable land management (SLM). This will enable them to obtain decent work in a sustainable low carbon world and help to address global challenges in particular, poverty eradication and the issue of migration.
Seeing the opportunities generated from sustainable land management and land restorations activities and the needs to engage young people in green sectors actively, the secretariat organizes an E-Forum Discussion “Empowering Youth through Green Jobs” aiming to promote and engage youth participation in green industries. Among the panelists is Ms. Zrinka Dermit the YPARD Croatia representative who takes on the role of a young expert in mobilizing and empowering youth in agriculture sector.
YPARD Nepal, a branch of global youth network in Nepal which is aiming to support young professionals in agriculture sector. We are delighted to share following opportunities among Nepalese young professionals.
1. Call for Participation in Workshop
The world is facing a global unemployment crisis. Young people, who have weaker links to the world of work than the general population, are particularly disadvantaged: their unemployment rate is almost three times higher than that of adults.
At the same time, there is a largely untapped reservoir of farm and non-farm employment opportunities in agriculture. This urgently calls for public and private sector cooperation to facilitate investments aimed at improving agricultural productivity and value chain efficiency, while engaging the youth. Agriculture and food systems development can be promoted in various ways. A key challenge is identifying what actions can be taken in a specific context to ensure that this development contributes to the creation of decent and productive employment opportunities for the youth.
Addressing the employment challenge requires more integrated approaches to agriculture and rural development. In particular, increased policy coherence is needed among agriculture, employment- and youth-related policies.
The role of FAO:
To orient its support, FAO developed an Integrated Country Approach (ICA) for promoting decent rural employment. The approach leverages a set of FAO's core functions, namely: policy and strategy advice, technical support and capacity development, knowledge generation, partnerships, as well as advocacy and communication. In depth scoping exercises are conducted in the inception phase of the Programme to better tailor the intervention to country demands and capacity development needs.
The entire approach is geared towards sustainable policy change and places emphasis on strengthening the capacities of national institutions responsible for agriculture and labour to promote decent rural employment, including through private-public partnerships and multi-stakeholder mechanisms. Also, the approach facilitates the collaboration among FAO and other UN Agencies, such as ILO or UNIDO. Gender equality and environmental sustainability are always mainstreamed as cross-cutting issues.
At country level, the approach aims in particular at enhancing the employment content of national strategies, policies and programmes for agricultural and rural development in order to optimize the contribution of the sector to improve the quantity as well as the quality of rural jobs. At the global and regional level, the approach contributes to develop and sharing knowledge, lessons learnt and good practices, as well as to influence regional and global initiatives on agricultural development.
As of today, the Integrated Country Approach has been implemented in two phases, both funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), through the FAO Multi-Partner Programme Support Mechanism (FMM):
Haowa Bello is a 33-year old agropreneur from Lagos, Nigeria. She is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Madame Coquette enterprise. Her company designs and manufactures line of luxury leather bags in Nigeria which are sold globally in New York, Berlin and London. Haowa is a beneficiary of the Youth Employment in Agriculture Programme (YEAP) that FAO is implementing together with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in Nigeria.
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