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Poverty, food insecurity and a lack of employment opportunities drive many young men and women around the world to search for jobs elsewhere. In Africa, where youth underemployment and unemployment rates are particularly high, many young people move away from rural areas, also because they do not perceive agriculture as an attractive and remunerative sector. The project aimed to address the adverse drivers of migration in two target countries, Tunisia and Ethiopia, which are particularly prone to rural outmigration of youth, while at the same time harnessing the development potential of migratory movements. In particular, the project focused on the [...]

This paper sheds new light on internal migration processes by estimating migration flows for 31 countries, focusing on step migration and on return migration back to rural areas from urban areas. The approach is to estimate the shares of the population (by gender) that move or stay in rural and urban areas over three periods (childhood and two forward periods). Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), the estimation was done with an information-theoretic procedure using maximum-entropy econometrics to estimate migration frequencies by population groups. Sizeable urban to rural migration flows are found, with rural returnees often contributing substantially [...]

This brochure presents FAO ’s work on agricultural innovation. FAO advocates a shift from interventions focusing on single components of agricultural innovation towards a system-approach aimed at strengthening institutions and stakeholders’ networks that better respond to the needs of smallholder farmers. Agricultural innovation is the process whereby individuals or organizations bring new or existing products, processes or ways of organization into use for the first time in a specific context in order to increase effectiveness, competitiveness, resilience to shocks or environmental sustainability and thereby contribute to food security and nutrition, economic development or sustainable natural resource management. Innovation is central to [...]

This course presents strategies to strengthen the impact of child labour reduction and youth employment policies and programmes by considering the two issues together. First, it builds an understanding of the differences as well as linkages between child labour and youth employment. Second, it highlights concrete measures to improve policy and programme coherence and support for young people to access decent opportunities in agriculture.

Migration is an intrinsic part of rural development. Yet, there are major knowledge gaps regarding its drivers, dynamics and effects on rural areas. This e-learning course allows to understand the linkages between migration and rural development with a particular focus on youth. It also provides policy recommendations on how to maximize the positive impacts of rural migration and minimize the negative ones.

Latin America and the Caribbean is falling short of the Sustainable Development Goal 1: Ending poverty. After two and a half decades of progress, poverty and extreme rural poverty increased by two percentage points each between 2014 and 2016. By 2017, there were an estimated 59 million poor and 27 million extreme poor in rural areas of the region. During the last 20 years, Latin America and the Caribbean has been at the forefront of global experiences in the reduction of rural poverty. The new regional context implies that the countries of the region must not only protect the progress made [...]

This guide was developed as part of the "Youth Mobility, Food Security and Poverty Reduction"(RYM) project implemented by FAO with funding from the Italian Cooperation. The document is aimed to public and private organizations wishing to select agricultural projects with criteria to ensure compliance with all requirements of form and quality. The guide presents the selection process of agricultural projects for individuals and producer's organizations in the perspective of supporting youth mobility, food security and poverty reduction. The approach is based on 3 levels of evaluation (bidder profile, quality and form of the project, and interview with the bidder).    

This document provides guidance to support the utilization of the “Rapid Capacity Assessment Tool: Empowering youth to engage in responsible investment in agriculture and food systems”.  The guidance document contains two distinctive, yet interrelated parts: • Guidance notes for organizers of the capacity assessment, which provide relevant information on planning, designing and conducting the capacity assessment; and • Guidance notes for facilitators, which contain concrete suggestions on how to prepare and facilitate multi-stakeholder discussions on the questions outlined in the tool.

This rapid capacity assessment tool aims to help practitioners (such as government agencies, youth organizations, or development partners) to carry out a multi-stakeholder assessment of existing and needed capacities to engage and empower youth to carry out and benefit from responsible investment in agriculture and food systems. It is designed to support the application of the CFS Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems (CFS-RAI), with a particular focus on principle four (“Engage and Empower Youth”). The tool addresses the different systemic dimensions of capacity development and focuses on: the institutional set-up for agricultural investment related policy processes; policies, [...]

The UN and the Somali Government launched the Programme on Youth Employment in 2015, with the objective of creating employment opportunities for youth between 16 and 35 years through vocational education, enterprise training, and the rehabilitation of infrastructure in high potential sectors of the economy. Alongside this initiative, FAO is working with the Ministry of Fisheries at Federal and State levels to implement the 5.3 million Euro project No piracy: Alternatives for youth living in coastal communities of Puntland, Galmudug and Mogadishu, also known as Coastal Communities Against Piracy (CCAP) Project. As the name suggests, the EU-funded project, launched in [...]