Youth – feeding the future. Addressing the challenges faced by rural youth aged 15 to 17 in preparing for and accessing decent work.
Dear Jacqueline Demeranville and Decent Rural Employment Team,
I’d like to take this opportunity to share some thoughts for the ‘Youth – feeding the future. Addressing the challenges faced by rural youth aged 15 to 17 in preparing for and accessing decent work’ consultation.
We are pleased and excited to see FAO focus on the unique challenges and opportunities facing rural youth. Here are some considerations from our work and experience. Our feedback is based on work we are doing in Kenya, Rwanda and South Sudan as part of a new initiative of World Vision called HungerFree – which aims to empower vulnerable youth by layering effective food and resilience programmes with youth development programmes that prepare youth for work and for life.
In addition to the thoughts below, we would be honored to have Paul Newnham, Global Youth Engagement Director and HungerFree Director, and Aaron Ausland, Youth Viability and Livelihood Senior Specialist who leads our Youth Ready model, participate in your expert meeting if beneficial.
- Based on your experience, what are the specific challenges rural youth aged 15-17 face (different from those over 18) in making a living in agriculture (current or future) and related activities?*
In many rural settings, a large number of youth discontinue schooling between the ages of 15-17 or sooner in order to contribute to their families’ income or help provide for younger siblings. While this may involve them in agriculture, the development of basic life skills and business acumen can be neglected. Many of these youth see agriculture only as a chore, or even punishment, and more of a backup plan than a preferred livelihood.
Within our work engaging low-income youth, we focus on youth viability and how youth are prepared for work and for life by investing in the successful and safe transition of children through basic skills, life skills, technical and vocational skills, access to capital and relational support.
When it comes to rural youth and agriculture, there are two additional things that need to happen in order for youth to find agriculture as attractive and meaningful:
- Farming must no longer be a solitary affair. One of the most frequent complaints from rural youth is that they are bored. Social isolation and boredom is for many a primary driver for youth to migrate to urban settings or across borders. For agriculture to become more attractive to youth, we must build community, connect their work to their social life, encourage more cooperative production, and facilitate more opportunities for youth to learn from and with one another.
- There must be a paradigm shift where youth think of farming as a business. For agriculture to become attractive, youth must see themselves as more than farmers continuing the same work as their elders, but rather as entrepreneurs and businesspeople. This requires financial literacy, business skills, an understanding of supply chains, age-appropriate access to capital, and pathways to land ownership or fair lease contracts that incentivize investment into and cultivation of the land.
- How can policies and programmes overcome the challenges faced by rural youth in a cost-effective manner? If they target older youth, how could we apply those policies to support youth under 18? Please share relevant examples and lessons from your experience.
One of the more significant challenges faced by rural youth, especially under-18, is their inability to access finance for land. This can be especially challenging for youth women. We need to ensure all youth have the same access and legal protections as adults, especially vulnerable youth. This includes financing, the ability to save and borrow funds, obtain land titles, and the ability to use that title to access capital. Programmes and policies that encourage and safeguard cooperative ownerships, so businesses can be social in a legal structure that protects its members beyond a handshake, would also make youth agriculture more successful and minimise risk.
We also need policies and programmes that invest in youth skills and readiness. In Rwanda, we are piloting a programme called Youth Ready, which prepares youth for employment, entrepreneurship or vocational training by focusing on basic skills, life skills and workforce readiness, and co-invests with youth in viable pathways to work. This is done in a cost-effective manner by facilitating group learning and peer support in cohorts, training local mentors and business coaching, establishing peer savings and loan groups, and partnering with local government and the private sector.
Youth also need opportunities to build their skills and create viable pathways forward without leaving their communities. It is important to provide agricultural extension services or establish training centers and learning plots that (1) are accessible and inclusive for rural youth, (2) use peer trainers able to really connect with young people, and (3) take an entrepreneurial approach to rural economic value chains.
- What are the most binding capacity constraints that you or your institution/organization encounter when designing, implementing and evaluating policies and programmes aiming to address the issues affecting rural youth under the age of 18? What are the data gaps regarding the challenges affecting rural youth employment and livelihoods that you periodically encounter?
The most binding capacity constraints our organization encounters pertains to youth readiness, matching youth skills to local market needs and access to financing and capital. In order for rural youth to thrive, they need skills to make a business plan and successfully manage their business. They also need to know where the opportunities exist and how to match their work to the market. More micro-regional data on local labour markets and demand for goods and services is needed. Additionally, in some places, gaps in banking policies may need to be addressed to ensure youth can access age-appropriate financial services, including loans.
For youth under-18, there is the added challenge of child labour definitions that can prevent youth from meaningful engagement, recognition and protection in the world of work. Therefore, policies are needed that both protect youth while empowering vocational pathways and the reality of their circumstances as working youth.
- How can education and vocational training in rural areas be improved to support rural adolescents and youth to productively engage in agriculture or related activities? What are the skills and support they need? What does the school-to-work transition for rural youth aged 15-17 look like and what works to effectively support rural youth during this transition?
We find that youth are often just taught what to do rather than how to fully exercise their agency. For youth, and especially youth aged 15-17, schooling and vocational trainings needs to be more participatory and socially engaging, located in the field and joined with technology. This includes:
- Build an entrepreneurial mindset – encourage youth to explore, monitor and see what works
- Invest in sustainable techniques – promote green business models that link together a whole value chain of production cycle inputs and waste products as new inputs
- Facilitate social learning and group collaboration – enable youth to work as groups where they can explore new ideas, techniques and crops together and minimise individual risk
- Connect with technology – teach technology skills so youth are trained to find market information, explore agriculture practices and techniques, and link to new learning, financing and work opportunities
- Emphasize life skills – ensure youth have the social and emotional skills needed for success in both work and in life
- Promote environmental restoration and resilience-building - use this as an opportunity to equip the next generation to be positive force of change
- Access - it is important that youth can access appropriate and inclusive training opportunities in or near their own communities. Once they leave home, they are less likely to return to deploy their new skills
Added together, these investments will make rural agriculture more exciting with more moving pieces to think about and work together on socially.
- What approaches are most effective in overcoming the additional challenges rural youth under the age of 18 face in accessing decent jobs, including (decent) green jobs (e.g. skills mismatch, health and safety conditions, discrimination, exclusion) or becoming entrepreneurs (e.g. barriers in access to finance, producers organizations and markets)?
Much of World Vision’s current approaches are viable and appropriate for youth as long as we include them and layer youth development strategies to support their transition into adulthood.
Through HungerFree, we are looking at how to layer youth development strategies alongside our food and agriculture programming in order to invest in the futures of rural youth. Programmes such as Cash for Assets leverage food assistance to provide both the food needed for today while building assets and capacity for long term development and food security. However, many of the rural youth who are not employed, in education or in training lack the basic skills, life skills, financial literacy and business skills to successfully sustain such an investment. By leveraging programmes like Cash for Assets and approaches like Youth Ready, we can more effectively invest in young people and overcome the unique challenges they face. This is designed to ensure youth can build assets that are productive and then have the skills to manage them.
For youth under the age of 18 who have already dropped out of school, this creates an alternative pathway to invest in their success both in work and in life.
Paul Newnham