Youth Engagement in Agricultural Value Chains Across Feed the Future

Despite emphasis on rural youth and their interests and needs, there is little information on what specific agriculture value chain activities have the capacity to absorb youth and transform their futures, and even less on how to effectively mainstream youth aged 15–24 as mandated in the 2012 USAID Youth in Development Policy.

This report aims to inform Feed the Future (FTF) efforts moving forward to more strategically and deliberately engage youth in market systems by providing insights from current FTF country programs. Commissioned by USAID’s Bureau for Food Security/Office of Country Strategy and Implementation, a research team with the Leveraging Economic Opportunities (LEO) activity scanned all 19 FTF countries and analyzed four FTF country programs in more depth through site visits to Guatemala, Liberia, Nepal and Uganda. These countries were chosen based on 1) their relatively high youth involvement in the portfolio; 2) youth mention in Country Development Cooperation Strategies (CDCS) and FTF strategy documents; and 3) geographic diversity. Case studies and success stories from these countries accompany this report and cover the following themes: Uganda - Adaptive Program Models; Guatemala – Engaging Rural Youth through Experiential Education; Liberia – Building Youth Resilience in Weak Market Systems; and Nepal – Household Approach to Reaching Youth.

Overall, this report is the result of discussions with program stakeholders from 13 FTF-funded programs, including 207 male and 177 female youth aged 10–40; 67 implementing partner staff members; and 26 FTF/Mission staff members from countries visited or consulted. The research team drew the bulk of the conclusions in this report from the four site visit countries, and reinforced and triangulated conclusions with experiences from other missions and youth technical experts. There are limitations to this approach as explored in the Methodology section; however, through the field work and vetting process and building on broader research from both youth development and agricultural systems, the research team feels confident that a set of useful, relevant findings have emerged from this work.

In each of the four countries, the research teams aimed to collect data around the following questions:

• What innovative approaches and entry points have resulted in improvements in youth skills and opportunities?
• Has youth engagement in agriculture filled unmet needs within the larger agricultural market system/value chain?
• Have upgrades in the value chain opened up new opportunities for youth employment/engagement?

The research team was surprised to discover that the findings around these key questions were slim—primarily because few FTF programs track age. Youth have not been a group targeted in most FTF programs. Many Missions are becoming aware of the need to target youth—more general market-driven programs may be creating opportunities, but without targeted support and skills development in place, youth are not effectively accessing market opportunities. Many programs with a stronger youth focus are just getting started, so it is too soon to know if their program designs will effectively address youth needs and help youth to grow and learn. Finally, most FTF programs in the countries visited tend to be highly focused on production, where youth face specific barriers that might be mitigated in potential roles higher up the value chain. However, the team did identify a number of findings and promising practices around youth engagement strategies, including specific FTF strengths and recommendations related to youth mainstreaming that may be useful to policymakers in designing youth FTF initiatives in the future. These findings, addressed in detail throughout this report, are summarized below.

Feed the Future Strengths for Youth Programming

The youth agricultural livelihoods field suffers from certain challenges that FTF is uniquely able to address. The development of more competitive, inclusive and resilient market systems that can sustain demand, support more actors (i.e., “absorb the youth bulge”), and catalyze economic activity in a variety of interconnected systems offers a range of opportunities for young people. FTF can be a powerful change agent in the sector with the strength to address the following critical gaps, among others:

• Forging links between stakeholders in the agricultural system
• Facilitating market linkages with the private sector that result in farming contracts and employment opportunities for youth
• Ability to effectively employ market assessments
• Capacity (of partners) to provide short technical training and demonstrations serving rural learners, which are appropriate for youth
• Ability to identify mid-chain/off-farm opportunities for youth
• Existence of built-in, intergenerational benefits in agricultural productivity and other programs
• Creating real pathways to profitable livelihoods that can change youth mindsets about agriculture
• Promotion of economies of scale in groups
• Climate-smart agriculture research

Engagement of Rural Youth in Feed the Future Programs

A major finding is that intentionality—when it comes to youth engagement—matters. Most FTF programs engage youth unintentionally, meaning youth were not specifically recruited or supported but are present in community-wide programming. There is little youth-specific data on these programs.

There are a handful of FTF programs designed to deliberately target youth (e.g., “intentional”). These are usually co-funded with other offices within USAID and therefore cover a number of youth development needs like health and education. These can be very strong flagship programs such as Akazi Kanoze in Rwanda, Youth Leadership for Agriculture Activity in Uganda, and POTENTIAL in Ethiopia, among others. In addition, there are unintentional programs that develop deliberate subactivities targeting youth as a result of reflection and adaptation. These are usually innovative and responsive to a specific youth opportunity. In neither the intentional youth-focused programs nor the unintentional youth-focused programs can youth be described as a cross-cutting theme. Youth as a cross-cutting theme in a project would imply that a minimum level of consideration of youth is built into all aspects of the program, as opposed to having a single component or activity that is targeted to address the youth.

Improved production, post-harvest handling, and marketing programs at the farmer level can be heavily populated by youth. As youth are already involved in agriculture and requirements for entry and time commitment are low, youth gravitate to these programs. Barring barriers to land and capital, youth can generally articulate a clear benefit in terms of building assets and skills that allow them to generate increased income via mixed livelihoods or increased production. Service-oriented opportunities such as village agent, dealer, transport, trader or farm services provider were highlighted, but there are significant barriers to success for youth, and beneficiary numbers are much lower. These service provider roles engage youth—mostly men—with slightly higher education levels and can create incentives for youth to obtain a minimum level of functional numeracy and literacy. In our research, there is also one example of a medium-sized, youth-led agribusiness incubator that develops businesses that both serve and employ youth (Commodity Production and Marketing Activity (CPMA) in Uganda).

In all cases, programs that benefit youth participants are made more challenging by national youth definitions and a lack of capacity or commitment to manage gender issues. The equal participation and benefit of younger youth and young women is a challenge, as target numbers—if they exist—do not correlate to specific activities. To effectively engage vulnerable youth, including younger individuals, heads of households, out-of-school, female, more time is required to develop and implement appropriate selection, placement of safeguards, staff capacity building or advisory staff, and youth-friendly practices. Budgets must be built with these extra costs in mind.

The prevailing sentiment regarding youth is that they are not interested in agriculture; they want white-collar jobs in urbanized environments using technology; and they need money fast. These assumptions about “youth in agriculture” are damaging. Most rural youth benefitting from FTF programs in the areas visited during the course of this study can and do work in agriculture, as their families have for generations. Market-driven FTF programs may have found it difficult to recruit youth, giving additional validity to some of the assumptions about youth not wanting to engage in agriculture opportunities. However, a more nuanced and localized understanding of the origin of these now widely held beliefs is needed to offset negative implications and associations. Until the main barriers to land, inputs and finance can be managed better, it will be difficult to meet many of their demands for “modernity.” However, these can be satisfied through communications efforts aimed at a refreshed understanding of productive agriculture; mechanized tools; improved inputs; and, most importantly, a vision for growth in terms of larger farms, new agricultural opportunities and/or diversified livelihoods.

Recommendations for Youth-Mainstreamed Program Design

While many models for youth engagement exist within the FTF portfolio, ultimately the most powerful model for harnessing the energy of youth to change the course of their incomes and futures lies in reinforcing youth as a crosscutting theme as identified in the USAID Youth in Development Policy. To this end, the research team has identified the following recommendations with prioritized action steps.

RECOMMENDATION 1: Reinforcing the Enabling Environment and Channeling Youth Voice

Youth benefit is strong where goals and strategies specific to youth in agriculture converge at the national government, donor, nongovernmental organization (NGO) and youth network levels. When young women and men have a seat at the table and are enabled to participate actively, creative solutions can emerge.

RECOMMENDATION 2: Inclusion of Youth Issues in the FTF Research Strategy, CDCSs, and FTF Country Strategies

As the FTF Research Strategy and other key guiding documents were developed before the development of the 2012 Youth in Development Policy, they do not include youth as a cross-cutting theme. Moving forward, these core documents should go beyond describing youth demographic data and specific challenges by detailing the intermediate results for male and female youth.

RECOMMENDATION 3: Developing the Capacity for Informed Solicitations and Proposal Review

Solicitations should provide IPs with a roadmap and a minimum expectation of performance related to youth engagement. Further, proposals should include both a ranking of the potential of activities to benefit youth in broad programming based on evidence or through pilot projects, and the solid identification of youth vulnerabilities and barriers, complemented by activities to mitigate these. Proposals should also look for youth expertise either in the form of consortia with youth-serving partners or advisory groups, or by hiring qualified youth specialists when programs are to include social and human dimensions of youth development.

RECOMMENDATION 4: Nurturing the CLA Approach

Where Mission staff are embracing an open, reflective culture, programs can pivot and make a significant positive impact on youth. Nurturing the capacity of Mission and IP staff to be adaptive, particularly when they have a high percentage of youth beneficiaries in a country or program, is a key contributor to success.

RECOMMENDATION 5: Tracking Performance

The overall effectiveness of a youth-focused agriculture sector intervention is dependent upon the ability of beneficiaries to attain, maintain and profit from a higher level of income generation. Consequently, monitoring and disaggregating development outcomes by age cohort—and within each youth cohort, gender, over time where relevant—is critical as a means to determine what benefits youth most, if at all. Particularly for interventions with a narrow focus, such as productivity improvement in the maize value chain or the provision of specific farm services such as spraying, there is an opportunity to internally develop specific methods to look at “value for money.” In this way, it is possible to determine cost and implementation effectiveness by disaggregated youth age and gender segment, looking specifically at changes in use of time, income and financial control.