Youths in Agriculture: Challenges and success

In the recent past a high number of youths have graduated from the institutions of higher learning and have flooded the job market thus an increase in the rate of unemployment. These youths are therefore forced to take up any opportunity that comes across despite their education background. These youths exist in both the rural and urban settings all over Kenya. In the past years most of those from rural background have migrated to towns looking for white collar jobs others remaining behind in the rural areas taking up casual jobs. Not all those who move to towns are lucky to secure a job and end up in their rural villages.

Challenges:
Traditionally the attitude of youths towards Agricultural activities was that it was meant for the poor. Through the Agricultural Sector Development Support Programme (ASDSP) youths training, various challenges were enumerated by the youths in Nyeri County. These challenges include: High cost of investment in Agriculture, challenges in access to credit, negative attitude towards Agriculture, lack of market, lack of knowledge in marketing, poor infrastructure, Agriculture as a labor intensive activity, youths are dynamic in nature, lack of land/space ownership and lack of water for irrigation (common to horticultural farmers)

One of the challenges that is so clear among the small scale farmers is market of agricultural products. For example in the poultry value chain constraints hindering market development for indigenous poultry products these include: mismatch between supply and demand which results in price discrepancies, supply is sometimes not reliable. This is a specific concern for hotels and institutions whose plans are based on regular supply, packaging is poor or no packaging at all, there is no branding and product diversification, no market segmentation and the existing groups do not cooperate with each other to optimize the supply and bring down transaction costs, there is not even information sharing on supply opportunities.

Successes:
Through collaboration of various stakeholders dealing with farmers and youths capacity building interventions have been conducted to over 500 youth farmers. These trainings and linking the small scale farmers some of the challenges have been dealt with. This have seen even youths from residing in urban areas succeed in Agribusiness. Agape youth group is one of the beneficiaries of the trainings; the members carry out poultry business in a rented place in Nyeri town. This is made possible through mapping assets (identifying the most readily available resources) and how they can be commercially utilized. The youths and women trained under the ASDSP do not only produce but also target to venture into other opportunities in the Agricultural value chain such as; being marketers, retailer/wholesaler, creating value added products or even offer storage facilities. This will create more opportunities for the youths as opposed to bringing about competition in the production level that may lead to overproduction creating market saturation. To strengthen their bargaining power the farmers in different value chains have formed Farmer Enterprise Groups (FEGs) to facilitate selling of the produces collectively as opposed to individual selling.

I acknowledge the efforts of ASDSP, County Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, Youth fund and A3 Consultants