Africa: 'Youth Dividend' Will Help Africa Produce Food and Jobs

The 2015 Africa Agriculture Status report, entitled Youth in Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, has been launched at the African Green Revolution Forum in Lusaka.

According to the report there are almost 200 million people aged between 15 and 24 on the continent, of whom 10 million enter the labour market every year. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity to encourage young people to drive growth by engaging in entrepreneurship - by producing food but also in the research, processing, packaging and retail sectors.

Already, African countries spend more than U.S. $60 billion on food imports each year. And the World Bank predicts that by 2030 an increase in incomes in major cities could generate consumer demand for food products in the region of U.S. $1 trillion.

This offers a massive opportunity for African producers. If we are to take full advantage of it, says Agnes Kalibata, the president of The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), entrepreneurship is vital.

"African 'agri-preneurs' can own that market," she says, "if we tap the two assets that should be an unbeatable combination: the world's largest population of young people, and the world's largest holdings of uncultivated arable land".

About 65 percent of Africa's labour force is employed in the agricultural sector but urgent challenges need to be addressed in order to meet consumer demand. These include: a poorly defined land rights tenure system, limited access to finance, insufficient quality farm imputs, limited access to agri-technology, a lack of entrepreneurial training and a lack of infrastructure.

Among recommendations made in the report by contributors:

"It's really time to strengthen the use of ICT in agriculture, all over Africa. So we recommend that countries put together strategies to strengthen ICT use in all the sectors from pre-production, production and marketing," says Ken Lohento, programme coordinator at the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation, an international non-profit set up under an agreement between the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries and the European Union.

"This is critical," he adds, "in order to facilitate access for agricultural entrepreneurs especially in rural areas. We need shared spaces where people can access ICTs in rural areas, and we need to reduce the cost of usage, and more infrastructure in rural areas."

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