Making African Agriculture Sexy: A Call to Action
The call for making African agriculture “sexy” has been amplified in the last couple of years. This comes at the heels of the Covid pandemic, climate change, and a youth unemployment crisis that has already morphed into a continental-wide pandemic.
Although moribund, the agriculture sector is the backbone of Africa, providing food, raw materials, income, and employment to millions across the continent. It is against this backdrop that African governments have underscored the need to attract and engage more youths in agriculture. It is envisioned that agriculture can help tackle youth unemployment and endemic food insecurity in the continent.
Nonetheless, African youths have had cold feet in pursuing agriculture as a viable career. This heightened African youth's apprehension of agriculture stems from system-wide issues.
Consequently, the catchphrase “making agriculture sexy” has become a prevalent theme in workshops and conferences in the developing world.
While the call to make agriculture sexy is timely and necessary, it overshadows some of the root causes of youth indifferences to agriculture. The fundamental question one would ask is why agriculture is unattractive to young people. Youths are evading agriculture because of barriers to entry and the backbreaking manual labor.
Assuming we are talking about a sexy car, or watch, we are indirectly implying the cost or price of that particular item. That is to say, the sexiness of anything is pegged on its cost, i.e. what went into the production.
Similarly, making agriculture sexy calls for a system approach considering the agricultural sector as a value chain from farm to fork. It encapsulates availing resources (inputs) like land, capital, markets, and extension services to farmers and other players within the agricultural sector.
Indeed, multiple opportunities exist for African youths to exploit and create sustainable enterprises in agriculture value chains. However, the reverberating challenge remains access to capital. If you talk to youths anywhere in Africa, from Limpopo to Nouakchott, the difficulty of acquiring capital echoes across the continent. Access to capital is critical to unlocking the dreams of young people across Africa.
Nonetheless, the call for making agriculture sexy merely stops at the symptoms of why agriculture is unattractive to young people. It does not address the root cause of the problem-neglect of the agriculture sector by successive African governments, and lack of resources.
The movie Field of Dreams strongly emphasizes that they will come if you build it. Simply put, if we invest in agriculture and related technologies and provide resources, then we will attract young people into agriculture.
As a sector, agriculture is extremely unpredictable due to the vagaries of nature. These challenges are exacerbated to a fault especially in rain-fed agriculture as in most African countries. With the impacts of climate change and global economic recession, African agriculture is becoming less productive and less attractive. This makes it likely that more young people would eschew agriculture.
As the theory of diffusion elucidates, people are likely to adopt an idea or innovation based on observability. For example, if young people can observe one of their friends making good money in agriculture, the likelihood of engaging in agriculture is higher and vice versa.
Consequently, efforts to make agriculture sexy should focus on diversifying production, improving resilience, and adapting to the changing climate. All these efforts require investments in agricultural hardware and software.
First, investments in agricultural software aim at improving agricultural productivity. Such factors include access to agricultural labor, credit, capacity-building, and land tenure rights. More youth can get into agriculture by opening flexible funding spaces where women and youth can access funding without requirements for collaterals.
Secondly, providing funding should be coupled with effective agriculture extension services to train youth and women entrepreneurs on financial management, business planning, risk analysis, and group approaches to enhance their effectiveness in agripreneurship. The bundling of agricultural services to African youths can prop up their adoption of agriculture as a career.
Similarly, beyond providing agricultural software, the continent needs to enhance agricultural hardware. Agricultural hardware involves the provision of physical infrastructures including rural innovation centers, rural markets, and storage rooms.
Hardware also includes collective policies that protect and guarantee smallholder farmers’ markets thereby reducing the exploitative tendencies of middlemen. Most importantly, it includes access to and utilization of Information and technology platforms to market agricultural produce beyond their localities. Also, it includes embedding evidence-based decision-making using data, research, and innovation.
Making agriculture sexy involves understanding the needs of the target clientele and collaborating with stakeholders to address existing and emerging agricultural challenges. In addition, it involves governments doing their part through policies that create an enabling environment to catalyze youth agribusiness in the continent.
Until youths and other smallholder farmers can have access to stable and flexible funding mechanisms and supportive infrastructure, African agriculture will always be in a moribund state. If we provide youth and women access to hardware and software tools, they will surely take up agriculture.
Organizations serving youth must meet them where they are if real change is to be achieved in Africa. However, if the priority among agriculture stakeholders is to attract donor funding through trendy topics, then making agriculture sexy remains a trendy and sexy topic. Until we build it, people will not come! Let’s focus on making agriculture funding available and more youths will get into agriculture.
Add a Comment