Agricultural Extension Key in Opening Up Opportunities for Youth

Continued growth and employment opportunities in the agricultural value chain needs to be taken more seriously as demand for food in Africa keeps growing.

This is reason why agriculture extension or training tends to be more important so as to help address emerging issues and sealing any gaps that may come up.

Agricultural extension focuses on delivering advisory services for technologies that help crop, livestock, and fishery farmers, among others.

Extension workers are trainers, advisors, project managers, community developers and policy advocators. They also conduct administrative support for local governments and help farmers make decisions and share knowledge.

Agriculture extension, which services smallholder farmers throughout the value chain, is crucial in achieving food, nutrition and income security.

Even though agriculture extension is key to building the food systems of the future, it is not always fit for purpose.

In Africa, for example, many government extension systems are bureaucratic, unaccountable and poorly resourced. At the same time, demand for extension services in Africa is growing. The clientele has grown beyond smallholders and young farmers to also include agribusiness enterprises.

In the past, extension focused on pulling up people who are down. But things have changed. Africa now has a different set of farmers who are more knowledgeable and linked with networks.  As such, extension has to pull up its socks and redefine who a farmer is and what services to offer.This transformation has to be market driven.

According to Dr. Jeff Mutimba of the SAFE Regional Program, extension needs to shift from focusing only on production but also be innovative and market driven.

“There is need for inclusiveness of all gender groups especially the youth, women & people with disabilities because they can be left out in developing markets that requires high standards,” said Dr.Mutimba.

In Africa, most of the youths are registered to use social media platforms. This is a big opportunity and thus youths need to be employed in the agriculture extension field to work with fellow youths, because they may have trending ideas.

Youth participation need to be increased by using social media platforms that they mostly relate with including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Youtube, LinkedIn among others.