المنتدى العالمي المعني بالأمن الغذائي والتغذية

I work with youth in the rural Kamuli District of Uganda who are both in school and out of school. These two categories of youth have the challenge of lack of vocational skills to undertake profitable agriculture ventures. This is more so due to the largely subsistence undocumented agricultural production in their homes from where they get a large part of their mentorship.

The government needs to design a national curriculum that makes vocational agriculture compulsory especially in rural schools. We need to engage the in school youth who are mostly under 18 in vocational agriculture trainings. These youth in school later drop out and start trying to forge a life especiallly out of agriculture. Through our in school youth program, an agriculture and entrepreneurship club in a high school in Kamuli has been started to train youth in agricultural production. These youth are now able to produce and put to the market crops to enable club members get some of the neccessities their parents cannot provide. This club is motivating alot of students and many are now joining to be apart of it.

In implementation of the inschool youth agriculture program, the greatest challenge remains the conflict of the schools timetable with garden work activities. We can only get a few hours every evening in the garden with the students especially the day scholars who have to get home early to help their parents. We have also implemented an input microfinance project where students could be given seed, agro chemicals and land where to produce and then continously monitored to see that they produce and put poducts to the market. This project has faced a problem due to the risk aversity of most youth especially the girls to loans. These youth fear taking the inputs even when these loans are interest free and no security is needed.

We can improve education by first engaging administration of schools to design timetables that provides enough time for vocational training. We then need to engage parents to accept the implementation of the trainings. Many parents have a negative attitude towards their children engaging in garden work while at school. The youth need to be encouraged  by providing financing interms of inputs to produce. They mostly need record keeping and market analysis skills to be able to engage in profitable ventures. With all these skills learnt in school, even when one drops out they can be able to apply them or even transfer them to their parents to encourage market oriented agricultural production. We can follow up these youth who drop out and support them together with their parents through providing inputs to produce and continously monitoring and mentoring them.

Most girls in rural areas have a negative attitude towards commercial agriculture. This attitude is influenced by the negative gender stereotypes that rural communities have about girls concerning ownership of properties and decision making on activities. Their involvement is limited by either over controlling parents or even jeolous husbands( These girls get married as early as 14 years). We have given security free input loans to out of school youth but mostly males take up these. There is a need to design these interventations intended to encourage girl empowerment such as input loans, trainings etc to involve those "in control" of the females ie husbands, parents or guardians so that girls can get involved. In this way youth of all genders can be able to earn something so as to improve their livelihoods.