The world is facing a global unemployment crisis. Young people, who have weaker links to the world of work than the general population, are particularly disadvantaged: their unemployment rate is almost three times higher than that of adults.

At the same time, there is a largely untapped reservoir of farm and non-farm employment opportunities in agriculture and food value chains. This urgently calls for public and private sector cooperation to facilitate investments aimed at improving agricultural productivity and value chain efficiency, while engaging the youth. Agriculture and food systems development can be promoted in various ways. A key challenge is identifying what actions can be taken in a specific context to ensure that this development contributes to the creation of decent and productive employment opportunities for the youth.

Addressing the employment challenge requires more integrated approaches to agriculture and rural development. In particular, increased policy coherence is needed among agriculture, employment- and youth-related policies.

Since 2011, FAO implements its Integrated Country Approach (ICA) for boosting decent jobs for youth in the agri-food system. The programme leverages a set of FAO's core functions, namely: policy and strategy advice, technical support and capacity development, knowledge generation, partnerships, as well as advocacy and communication. In-depth scoping exercises are conducted in the inception phase of the Programme to better tailor the interventions to country demands and capacity development needs.

The entire approach is geared towards sustainable policy change and places emphasis on strengthening the capacities of national institutions responsible for agriculture and labour to promote decent rural employment, including through private-public partnerships and multi-stakeholder mechanisms. Gender equality, decent work and environmental sustainability are mainstreamed as cross-cutting issues.

At country level, the approach aims in particular at enhancing the employment content of national strategies, policies and programmes for agricultural and rural development in order to optimize the contribution of the sector to improve the quantity as well as the quality of rural jobs. At the global and regional level, the approach contributes to develop and sharing knowledge, lessons learnt and good practices, as well as to influence regional and global initiatives on agricultural development.

As of today, the Integrated Country Approach has been implemented in three phases, all funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). Expand each tab below to find out more about each phase.