Nana
Adwoa Amponsah Sifa is a young Ghanaian graduate Agripreneur with hands on
experience in food security and strategic management from Africa, Europe and
Asia.
She
shares the experience of her initiative, Guzakuza,
a venture with the mission to transform the mindsets of young women to go into
agribusiness to be job providers and not job seekers.
“The
young people know what they want and they are ready to take up their destinies into
their own hands,” she said, emphasizing the need to involve young people in
decision making processes.
Guzakuza in Swahili means ‘grow’
and Nana wants to grow wealthy agriculture entrepreneurs, mainly women from
Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya.
The
venture has recognized a need among the rural youth who have jobs but are underemployed,
hence earn less from the abundant opportunities.
Meanwhile,
young graduates roam the urban streets in search of non-existing white-collar
jobs.
The
combined burden of a youth bulge and shrinking job market have left millions of
young people jobless, underemployed and excluded from economic opportunities.
Under
Guzakuza, the ‘Ignite’ program has been developed to connect the rural and urban
young woman to help address the challenges of lack of capital and capacity to
be successful in agribusinesses.
This
year, 15 beneficiaries are receiving a six month intensive skill incubation
which involves mentorship and internship to learn on the job.
“We
want it to be as practical as possible because we’ve had enough of the theory
in Africa,” said Nana Adwoa, who is among young people who participated in the
2nd Africa Rural Development Forum (ARDF) in Yaoundé, Cameroon.
The
Forum, which is under the AU/NEPAD Rural Futures program, was held under the context of youth employment and its attendant dynamics of
rural development, farming systems and agriculture food markets.
“Whilst
developing national strategies and action plans are important, making a better
inroad in transforming our rural areas through job creation for youth calls for
a decentralized approach to designing and implementing policies for employment
and skills development,” said Estherine Lisinge-Fotabong, Director of Programme
Implementation and Coordination Directorate at NEPAD Agency.
She
also advocates a reformation of the tertiary education systems so as to
reconfigure the future workforce in Africa towards needs and tastes of a
youthful continent that produces and consumes its own value-added products and
services.
Research
indicates that the proportion of rural youth is decreasing in all sub-regions
as well as the absolute number of rural youth, with the exception of
sub-Saharan Africa where their number will continue to increase until 2030 or
2040.
Lack
of access to relevant entrepreneurship training, technology, credit and
finances in both urban and rural contexts are huge disincentives for youth to
engage in business.
Projects
like Guzakuza build synergies with
organizations like Agri-Impact Consult which offer technical support to agribusiness
start-ups.
Executive
Director of Agri-Impact, Dan Acquaye, has a 20 year experience as an
agribusiness development expert, nurturing and growing agri-business SMEs in
Africa.
He
has observed that “much as we have a lot of young people moving from rural
areas to urban areas, we also see some of the young people moving from the
urban areas going into the rural areas; I think what is driving the movement
from one place to the other is the ability to exploit opportunities”.
Mr.
Acquaye says rural industrialization should not only focus on farming but the
entire agri-business value chain “and the young people have ideas on how they
can turn most of our post-harvest losses in rural areas into businesses”.
The Yaoundé Declaration and Plan of Action for
Africa Rural Transformation has recommended, among others, the need to build on
the comparative advantage of youth by investing in hard and soft rural infrastructure,
including ICT to build the capacity of youth to leverage on the rural-urban nexus.
“We really want to move from that picture of
looking at subsistence agriculture; we want to look at agriculture as a
business which will attract young people into it,” noted Estherine.
Young agripreneurs like Nana Adwoa believe a deliberate
attempt to integrate youth economic empowerment programmes in national policy frameworks
will help advance both rural and urban economies.
No comments:
Post a Comment