Youth agripreneurship in Africa; Launch of a new Community of Practice

Youth are widely recognized as key players in food system transformation. Their engagement has become an important element in strategies, programmes and international policy fora around agripreneurship and food systems transformation. But too often, youth are regarded as a homogenous group, whereas they have a wide variety of roles and backgrounds. From rural female farmer, to urban male consumer, from educated professional to aspiring small entrepreneur. What strategies, approaches and initiatives work best to best serve those different groups and meaningfully engage them in the different stages of the initiatives? Furthermore, initiatives tend to heavily focus on the supply side, building the skills and capacities of youth, whereas the actual opportunities to engage in decent employment or business opportunities get less attention. How could youth agripreneurship initiatives better integrate the supply and demand side in food systems?

This is what the new Community of Practice about youth agripreneurship will look into. The CoP will help practitioners and policy makers to develop and implement more effective interventions, in close collaboration with youth representatives from those different groups. The CoP builds on last year’s multi-platform collaboration between the Netherlands Food Partnership, INCLUDE and The Broker on inclusive youth agripreneurship in Africa, which resulted in this research report and a policy brief.

The goals of the CoP are:

1. Improved agripreneurship programmes for entrepreneurial youth, subsistence farmers and youth that are (seeking) employment in the food system, as well as specific marginalised sub groups within these categories.
2. Improved enabling environment in which youth agripreneurship programmes are implemented.
3. Increased knowledge, awareness and collaboration amongst relevant food systems stakeholders around youth agripreneurship.

Join the first learning session

The CoP starts off with a series of 3 interactive learning sessions in which members exchange about their lessons, best practices and challenges in cases from their own practice. In the first session, we will dive deeper into strategies to effectively serve the needs of different youth groups, through integrated programming and the use of different engagement tools. Representatives from different youth groups will be invited to join these sessions and present their own perspectives. These case study presentations serve as ways to inspire and learn from one another, improve our interventions and develop a practical guide of best practices.

Are you interested or involved in youth agripreneurship initiatives as a professional, policy maker or member of a youth network? Would you like to join open learning conversations to improve your efforts? Then we welcome you as a participant in the learning sessions and a member of the CoP. The first session takes place on Tuesday 11 July 2023, at 10:30 CEST. Please register for the session and/or request membership of the CoP here.