7 Ways to Encourage Youth Agriculture Participation

1. Raising Awareness: It is no longer news that publicity and advertising are the lifeblood of any venture. The federal government must examine the need to raise awareness among adolescents through various channels such as mass media and social media.

According to research, the majority of Nigerian adolescents spend 5 to 6 productive hours each day on social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Nairaland. Some of these teenagers waste useful hours screaming, condemning, and whining about how horrible the current administration is, and so on. The government should promote and engage these adolescents through different agricultural programs and projects. To encourage youths to participate actively in agriculture, awareness should be raised through the venues stated above.

2. Organizing training/seminars/workshops/symposiums: In order to stimulate youth engagement in agriculture, the government should invest in training the youths. Youths should be provided adequate instruction to motivate them.

3. Empowerment: The federal government should include empowerment in its programs to encourage youths following training.

Empowerment may take many forms, and the following are some of the ways the government can help young people who want to work in the trade. By offering financial assistance, the government should guarantee that youths get financial assistance in the form of grants and loans in order to motivate trainees in various agricultural programs.

4. Professional guidance: The government should put in place facilities that would motivate youths even more. Professional facilitators and trade craftsmen should be hired to educate youths and guarantee that they get mandatory periodic training, seminars, workshops, and symposiums to further develop their abilities.

5. Subsidized agricultural tools: The government should ensure that farm equipment are offered at subsidized prices to young individuals. Farm machinery such as ploughs, ridgers, tractors, cultivators, and so on should be offered at extremely low prices to encourage young people to get involved in agriculture.

The task of empowering youngsters should not be placed only on the federal government. Governments at all levels (federal, state, and municipal) should also promote youths to participate in agriculture.

6. Ease of access to government grants: The government should make loans, fertilizers, and other agriculture instruments available to youths and farmers. Most of the time, we discover that the requirements for obtaining these amenities are outrageous

The government should encourage youths to participate in agriculture by making sure that resources such as government subsidies, loans, and agricultural tools are freely accessible.

7. Program and project monitoring: The federal government should establish committees to examine how funds are handled and to monitor all agricultural initiatives. The bulk of the problems we have in our nation today are the consequence of corruption and abuse of public funds, which is no longer news.