CELEBRATING UNITED NATIONS WORLD YOUTH SKILLS DEVELOPMENT DAY

Training young people to become market gardeners and poultry farmers is an innovative answer to stimulating agricultural growth, reducing high unemployment, crime and generating income for self-improvement.
Our training imparts valuable and applicable life skills for all involved.

Entrepreneurial skills will give participants real-life simulations and applications to the agriculture sector. The impact of operating a self-sufficient agricultural training centre like ours will ensure a sustainable revenue stream for youths, while also creating a ‘real-life’ holistic training environment for participants. The Foundation currently has 48 young individuals that have participated in the training so far but plans to train 3000 individuals per quarter (every 3 months) in one centre which would equate to 12,000 youths in a year. In training one individual to create their own market garden, they have the potential to create employment for three individuals when we consider the multiplier effect this would mean we would be able to create a minimum of 36,000 jobs from a year of training in just one centre. Empowering the youth and stimulating the agriculture sector may provoke a high impact value on alleviating poverty and creating a life-long learning generation.

Growing food for our community is our skill and we join the rest of the world to celebrate the UNITED NATIONS WORLD YOUTH SKILL DEVELOPMENT DAY.

Four Agricultural Fields With Goods Job Prospects

When you hear the word “agriculture,” images of a farmer atop his tractor may come to mind, but there are a slew of other related professions to pursue, from engineering to economics.

Earlier this year, a study led by Purdue University determined that in the next five years there would be close to 60,000 job openings annually in fields related to agriculture, food, the environment, and renewable natural resources. We spoke to three professors at Purdue—a major research university located in West Lafayette, Indiana, which is consistently ranked as having one of the top agricultural sciences programs in the country (and world for that matter)—on which professions are emerging in this field.
Agricultural and Biological Engineering

Agricultural engineers can focus on machine design, design, and processes of getting food produced at the farm to your plate, or environmental challenges working with soil, water, and air, says Bernard Engel, head of Purdue’s Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. Careers include working for equipment manufactures in the agricultural, forestry, construction, and military industries. On the environmental and natural resources end, there are jobs with various government agencies or consulting firms.

Engel says the all of the programs in his department are in high demand right now. “Many of the advances in agriculture right now are coming in this area. The future looks bright as well, given expectations of even more technology being used in agriculture in the future,” he says in an email.

Biological engineers deal with issues that include food processes, things like making food taste better or making it last longer; and cellular and biomolecular engineering, which concerns “finding better ways to get value from by-products or getting energy from biological materials.” The food industry is a major employer. Engel says there is also a demand in research and development for these graduates, not only in the food and pharmaceutical industries, but also in genetic engineering in plants.

Agricultural Systems Management graduates help make agricultural technology easier to understand and use, says Engel, and students in this area are “highly sought after in careers with machinery, grain handling, and precision technology.”

Soil Science

Students can focus on soil ecology, chemistry, physics, conservation, and soil landscapes—mapping the soil attributes of a certain area—among other fields of study. John Graveel, an agronomy professor and director of the Natural Resources and Environmental Science program at Purdue, says job prospects for soil scientists right now are very strong.

“Soil science students are getting some training in geographical information systems [GIS],” Graveel tells Modern Farmer in a phone interview. (GIS is a computer system that is used for collecting and displaying data as it relates to geographic points on the Earth’s surface.) “It’s hugely in demand right now by consulting firms to have people on staff who know how to do GIS.”

Agricultural Economics

Agricultural economics is the practice of applying economic principles to public and private decisions made in the agricultural sector, explains Kenneth Foster, head of Purdue’s Agricultural Economics Department. The field includes sales and marketing, agribusiness, farm management, policy making, and natural resource and energy economics.

Job prospects are “pretty strong” for graduates in this “heavily data and metric driven” field, Foster says. “We placed 98 percent of our graduates last May by the end of the summer. Well over 100 students got jobs.”

Pro tip: Foster says because we’re entering an era of data-driven decision making, “the students who can position themselves to be strong from an analytical and problem-solving perspective are going to have an edge in the market.”

All three professors agree on what students interested in these fields should be focusing on: math and science. You get a bonus for taking part in extracurricular activities that help build leadership, communication, and organizational skills.

Startups

Finally, let’s not forget the entrepreneurs out there who are tech savvy and like to go it alone. Agricultural technology startups are blooming right now. Last year the industry grew by 170 percent and had more than $2.36 billion in investment, according to the website TechCrunch.

“I think the agricultural tech industry is doing well because it’s been overlooked for awhile. I think that’s really going to change and it’s going to continue to grow,” says Jason Aramburu, founder and CEO of Edyn, a startup that makes a smart watering sensor for crops.


By Andrew Amelinckx for Modern Farmer

Youth Unemployment - Perspective

My experience working on the YAE project since 2012, exposed me to a variety of salient issues youths in Nigeria are confronted with. Some of these findings have shaped my perspective on the unemployment issue.

1. OPPORTUNITIES - During the initial research phase of the YAE project, a detailed survey was carried out to gauge the depth of the unemployment problems. The most noticeable issue exposed by the survey was the chronic lack of opportunities for the youth population. The lack of balanced participation and representation of young people amongst the policy-makers made it extremely hard to propagate laws that included youth problems amongst the policies been passed. Majority of young people I interacted with were keen on gaining useful employment mainly driven by the desire to gain independence and self-expression. The level of willingness demonstrated by most of the individuals was not proportional to the opportunities available. There are very few youth specific jobs created by the policy makers in the country to address youth unemployment and poverty. A pervading belief of solving youth poverty and empowerment by creating jobs for their parents was evident. This is main driven by the cultural view of empowering the parents and assuming that it translates as empowerment for their children.

2. INAPPROAPRIATE TRAINING AND SKILL SET - The 21st century has experienced incredible development in science and technology which has affected the socio-economic landscape globally. The job market is constantly shifting and evolving to match these developments. Job definitions are changing and valued skills set have evolved to the point that its completely contrary to those been proffered to youths in academic institutions. A lot of young people are been trained through formal education along the models and syllabuses created to suit the economy of the last century. The education we received was modeled after an economy that was driven on quantization and classification. Jobs had defined roles and expectations. A science student focused on learning the theories and concept valuable and isolated to the scientific world without the need to learn business skills, social sciences or consumer behavior while a student of the arts faculty would focus on their discipline without any understanding of the telecommunications, environmental sciences. The current global economy on the contrary places high value on dynamic and versatile personnel due to the complex overlap and interaction of various disciplines for a given job. This has led to an increase in young people spending valuable years in educational training and then ushered into a global economy that has no need for their skills set. Another factor that is often muted is the penchant for parents to coerce their children into studying disciplines that are traditionally viewed as reputable professions while the interest, the zeal and natural flair for that field might not be present in the individual.

3. THE ENTREPRENEURIAL APPEAL – The focus on entrepreneurship as a tool of battling unemployment has been prevalent amongst majority of developmental organizations with interest in youth unemployment. This trend has become so popular because it’s a solution that typifies the bottom –up approach. Young individuals without jobs and a steady means of income invariably turn to various forms of entrepreneurship. This is usually an option driven by necessity. The increasing number of young individuals going through formal education and decreasing number job of opportunities has forced young individuals to create their own jobs. This option has become very popular with the high level of job insecurity. Jobs are created and destroyed at a faster rate than ever before in our history this has made the appeal of entrepreneurship stronger for young individuals that are about to start their careers. This factor along with the desire to express their own identity and beliefs in the global socio-economic landscape has led to a lot of youth wanting to become entrepreneurs. As a young person, we believe we have novel ideas, new ways of viewing the world’s challenges and new needs that can only be serviced by creating our own enterprises to solve them.

4. GLOBAL PEER LINKAGE - My experiences working with agriculture as a developmental tool in Nigeria has exposed me to the vast possibilities that lay abound in entrepreneurship in the country and the continent at large. Re-positioning the African youths to partake in the entrepreneurial pursuit and creating an enabling environment for businesses to thrive would play a massive role in helping Africa overcome its last major challenge outside of peace and security – youth unemployment. Attracting individuals and corporations with the know-how of developing enterprises and businesses in Africa would only be possible with strong ground work in investment finance, business networking opportunities and developing indigenous capabilities to trade with their global counterparts. A strong framework of business development across and between African countries would need to be in existence for this vision to be achieved.

Nigerian Government to Create 700,000 jobs through Agro-Entrepreneurship

The Nigerian Government is set to launch a Youth Agricultural programme that would create 700,000 new jobs in the economy. Mimicking the model of the proposed Youth Agro Entrepreneurs training centres, the Federal government aims to invest in building centres across the federation that would train young farmers on the needed set of skills to start up as entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector.

The Minister for Agriculture, Dr. Adesina confirmed this at a press conference at Akure, Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA) ceremony where he stated that commercialization of the farming sector is key to developing a stronger economy. This developments surely highlights the hope of many organization s and individuals interested in agro-business across the nation.

Surveys carried out by our teams in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja amongst 304 young person(s) showed a strong interest in attending and taking part in such trainjng programmes, to learn how to run profitable and sustainable farm enterprises that would match up with the global agricultural standards and help in playing a part in assuring food security for the country and the region.

Click here to read more on the Minister's declarations.