Urging youth to take up farming key in addressing unemployment

The Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examination results will soon be out. There are hundreds of thousands of 17-year-old Kenyans currently in their parents’ houses wondering what the future holds for them.

The lucky ones will get admission to university or various middle-level and certificate colleges to continue with their education.

For most, however, this is it. They must grow up fast, get something to do urgently to earn an income. Their choices are limited: Migrate to towns and cities to seek clerical or menial jobs or, for girls, get married and start having children.

Very few of the young people will be taking long walks across the ridges in rural areas, taking in all the scenery and wondering what opportunities exist in the vast swathes of land.

Even fewer living in the rural areas ever pick up the jembe to accompany their parents to the shamba for an early morning ploughing session.

FORMAL EMPLOYMENT

To them, the future lies in cities, or in formal employment at nearby factories, not in their increasingly smaller pieces of land.

Agriculture, they say, belongs to the elderly — their parents and grandparents, not young men and women fresh out of school.

That is why they would rather migrate to cities to live in slums and take up menial jobs — cooks, watchmen, machine operators and porters — than take chances on their parents’ pieces of land in the rural areas.

The African youth’s reluctance to take up agriculture was one of the concerns discussed during a recent United Nations forum held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The 2017 Conference on Land Policy in Africa was organised by the Africa Land Policy Centre together with the Economic Commission for Africa, the African Development Bank and the African Union.

MIGRATE TO CITIES

Its theme was “The Africa we want: Achieving socio-economic transformation through inclusive and equitable access to land by the youth”.

Across Africa, the population of rural areas is on the decline as more young people migrate to cities and towns.

The World Bank estimates that 12 million youth enter the job market in Africa every year, yet governments on the continent can only create three million jobs annually.

Today, 45 per cent of Africans live in urban areas, and the figure is rapidly growing.

This calls for a rethinking of how to utilise the millions of jobless young people roaming our streets in search of jobs.

One of the best ways to sort out the unemployment crisis is to encourage the youth to take up agriculture.

NEGATIVE ATTITUDE

This, however, is easier said than done, considering the negative attitude the youth have towards agriculture. To them, the tilling of fields and the tending of domestic animals are activities best left to elderly people.

Statistics show that the average age of an African farmer is 60.

This means the food consumed on the continent is mostly produced by men and women who have retired from formal employment, an unsustainable situation. Therein lies the dilemma.

While there are numerous opportunities and limitless amounts of money to be made from agricultural ventures, the hard part comes in convincing the youth to stay on their rural farmlands and not to take off to cities in search of non-existent opportunities.

One of the problems young people face is difficulty in owning land. Land is, by and large, held in the names of parents or ageing grandparents, which makes it difficult for a young person to even think of commercialising the property on which he or she stays, and which belongs to someone else.

CAPITAL

But even if, somehow, the young person came to own the land, they would still face the daunting task of gaining access to the capital required to develop that property.

This would then escalate to lack of a market for produce and the all-too-familiar exploitation by middlemen.

The conference discussed various themes around this problem, from the land and agriculture policies that lock out the youth and women to sustainable land-based investments.

Also discussed were themes such as technology and innovation, customary land rights in Africa, land administration, migration, radicalisation and violent extremism and how to tell the African agriculture and land story.

As Dr Abdalla Hamdok, the deputy secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, said, “There is no doubt that land is central to livelihoods and sustainable development. It forms the basis for agriculture, forestry, mining, industry, tourism and urban development. But to maximise on the benefits of land and its resources, inclusion of land users in decision-making on how land is governed and managed is crucial.”

PROPERTY RIGHTS

“The promotion and protection of land and the property rights of marginalised communities, including women, youth and pastoralists, is particularly important.

Equally, sustainable land use planning and management, documentation and digitisation of records, developing the capacity of land professionals to cater for current and emerging societal needs and utilisation of technology for improved agricultural production are a few of the measures that ought to be undertaken.”

Various papers were presented by prominent scholars on the success stories from across the world that Africa could learn from to correct the mistakes that African governments have made over the years.

Land is an emotive issue that quite often leads to conflict in Africa, with Kenya being one good example.

To ensure food security, peace and development, African governments were encouraged to address their land and agriculture issues.

 Mr Ouma is Saturday Nation’s Chief Sub-Editor