In a recent IFPRI blog post, Karen Brooks suggests that “for a generation of [African] young people entering adulthood, agriculture offers the best opportunity to move out of poverty and build satisfying lives”. She goes on to argue that young people could only benefit from this opportunity if leaders made policy and investment decisions that increased the competitiveness of Africa’s ‘local farmers’.
Over the last three years the Future Agricultures Consortium’s Young People and Agrifood theme has interrogated this idea. In recent work we developed an innovative way of thinking about work opportunities for rural young people that builds directly on the now widely used transformative social protection framework.