MwAPATA Institute, NYCOM moves to attract youths into agriculture
Malawi’s agriculture policy thinktank – MwAPATA Institute – and the state-funded National Youth Council of Malawi (NYCOM) have agreed to work together in finding solutions to challenges preventing young people from participation in agriculture.
MwAPATA Institute Executive Director, William Chadza, said it is said that despite young people accounting for over 80 percent of the total population, the youth do not seem to take interest in agriculture, which is Malawi’s economic mainstay.
Chadza made the remarks in Lilongwe during the presentation of a study on barriers and prospects of youth participation in agriculture and food systems in Malawi.
The study was looking at some of the prospects and opportunities for young people engagement in agriculture and agri-food systems. It also looked at some of the impediments and barriers, which are constraining them from engaging in agriculture.
“We found out a number of things. One of them is a significant decline in terms of the population of young people involved in agriculture, and also the levels of technology which they are applying, and also other challenges around the access to finance and also access to markets, especially stocked markets, which would give them better returns from their engagement and investments in agriculture,” he said.
“And also, we noted that although we have a relatively conducive policy environment, but I think there are challenges when it comes to implementation, especially specific strategies, which would guide what ought to be done in order to support the youth engagement in agriculture. But in the course of the study, we also looked at the some of the opportunities and actually, what could actually be done to enable or incentivize the participation of the youth in agriculture. So we noted that there were a number of opportunities which would be done there. One of them is looking at the financing in terms of possibility to establish a special window, which would provide the financing to the youth so that they engage in agriculture, and also supporting the youth with the financial literacy, so that they gain knowledge and capability to be able to manage finances,” he added.
In his remarks, NYCOM Executive Director, Rex Chapota, commended the think tank for living in this groundbreaking research on barriers and prospects of young people in food systems in Malawi.
Chapota agreed with MwAPATA Institute that the agriculture sector has failed to attract youth participation, with numbers of the youths working in the sector steadily declining over the past two decades.
“The results in this case is giving us an impetus to start engaging in a very rigorous manner to all stakeholders that are involved in ensuring that young people can be involved in agriculture. This study will help us also to inform our programs. Currently, we are finalizing our strategic plan as a National Youth Council of Malawi. The findings will already find their space in our plan so that we can bring back young people to agriculture. And the kind of agriculture that young people are talking about is not just traditional agriculture. They want commercialized agriculture. They want agriculture that is knowledge based, agriculture that is being powered by digitalization. So indeed this is a standard that will form our next steps to engage young people in agriculture. And indeed the council will take this moving forward,” he said.
