Youth Employment: Where do we hinge our Opportunity Search?

Some deductions on what need to do to create youth employment are crystalizing: focus on the value chains, promote investment in value addition, support that through organized structures that support that paradigm, create strategies that drive the structures, infuse systems that ensure the realization of the strategy but ensure that you have the right staffing to drive the strategy and make them build solutions. The youths need to be the staff who will develop the solutions. Whatever strategies are created, they have to promote clearly defined roles that empowered staffers comprising of youths and the solutions need to address.

This background supported a recent engagement where I was recently requested by one of my clients, involved in agriculture for rural development, to think with them through a model that can support sustainable development in the agricultural space so that we can generate employment for the youths in rural areas of Kenya. I obliged and went through the motions of looking at the opportunities that diverse agricultural commodities can support along their value chain supported engagements. My client and I appreciated that too much talk has gone into discussing the policies that governments create. We were awake to the reality that few people are able to demonstrate to the government where policies should link youth actions with production with what the diagram displayed with this post shows at the peak-DATA and its support infrastructure the AI or Artificial Intelligence.

The Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) works through partnerships drawn with institutions that have something, or anything, to do with data that impact nutrition, and the food that meets the nutritional requirement of all people. GODAN's effort seeks to ensure that the promise that mankind can entertain the thought of sufficient food come 2050 is feasible. Such a scenario, however, may not be possible if youths are not empowered to realize food production comes from organized productive processes that use digital systems that youths can relate with. Business models and the technologies that are commonly deployed need to give the opportunity to integrate youth to do food at the production level...indeed even at consumption. Some youths have to be persuaded to engage with food as they are so keen on observing their God-Given Shapes which they seek to maintain.

Since governments do not have a perpetual source of resources to support employment generation, the key factor in enabling the youth to realize their potential is integrating their agenda with the interests with value chain stakeholders. such will include policy and private sector actors who are keen on promoting sustainable partnerships in a win-win dimension for all. This, however, requires contextualized education that promotes extension service delivery. Extension, even education alone, however, does not achieve much if it is not backed by research undertaken within an Action Research paradigm undertaken with Farmers and Farmer Organizations. This may, however, call for a dose of entrepreneurship among the practitioners or in the organization being supported. Entrepreneurship, on the other hand, works with consumers who are communicated to and when they are a number to be supported from a collaborative dimension. Effective communication may, however, call for training as well as the use of technologies so that the communication generates trade between the actors. This may, however, be a daunting task if there is innovation called in but no investment is brought in. The role of Open Data, the peak in the diagram shown in this post, therefore, becomes a critical enabler for the opportunity to realize the nutrition agenda and with it to attract the right network of actors within the production and knowledge environment.

This week just ended with the Digital Earth Africa Conference at the RCMRD where GODAN signed an MoU with RCMRD to promote data use in Africa within the perspectives discussed in the foregoing paragraph to create employment within the layers of the knowledge value chain that youths can relate to. This is the sworn agenda for GODAN in Africa which we hope we can walk together, for it is this single focus that will certainly generate youth employment that will hinge the solutions for any opportunity search.