On May 22, 2018, a Community of Practice (CoP) meetup around youth in agribusiness and food systems was facilitated by AgriProFocus and the Food & Business Knowledge Platform. The objective of the CoP is to share recent work on youth in food systems, provide feedback on each other’s work, identify knowledge questions and ideas for joint action, find innovative solutions for urgent issues, and to get to know other stakeholders working in this field as well as inspiration for collaboration.
This meetup zoomed in on how youth organize themselves around issues in the agriculture and food sector. In many development policies and programmes, there is a growing emphasis on the need to involve youth in agriculture in order to create employment, build up livelihood opportunities and engage in community development. The argument is often made that youth themselves can act as change makers, leaders, entrepreneurs, productive economic assets and social disruptors within their communities, sectors and countries. Much has been done to develop skills, education opportunities and employment placements for young people with a host of different interventions. However, how young people, and the organizations they lead, are trying to effectively change the way food systems work is relatively unexplored terrain. There is still much we can learn from the diversity, creativity and different organizational approaches through which young people contribute to change and food system innovations.
An agricultural cooperative is an organizational structure which should offer youth opportunities that they would not be able to access as individuals, such as through demo-plots or internal lending structures. Associations, groups, hubs, and networks can be other forms to organize youth or ways that youth organize themselves in order to create more opportunities.