Youth in Food: Opportunities for education and employment
This issue of the Urban Agriculture Magazine explores challenges and solutions raised by migration pressures with a focus on youth employment in city region food systems. It includes examples from Brazil, Canada, China, Indonesia, Liberia, Mali, Nepal, Peru, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and the United States, and from small to mega-cities, urban, periurban and rural spaces. This collection explores opportunities for and barriers to youth employment along the entire food system.
The Urban Agriculture Magazine functions as a platform for exchange and discussion of grounded information on urban agriculture: research results, project experiences, and critical analyses of conventional and innovative policies on urban agriculture. The Urban Agriculture Magazine is published twice a year. The focus of the Urban Agriculture Magazine is on: “Research into Use” and “Policy to Practice”. This 35th edition of the UA Magazine (PDF) explores challenges and solutions raised by migration pressures with a focus on youth employment in city region food systems. It is produced by the RUAF Foundation with the support of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), CGIAR Water, Land and Ecosystems Research Program (WLE), Wilfrid Laurier University’s Centre for Sustainable Food Systems (CSFS) and the Food & Business Knowledge Platform.
The editorial highlights that discussions often focus on developing rural agriculture or rural food value chains to keep youth from moving. This is not only a limited vision of the nature of migration and the potential of rural agriculture; it also leaves out city region food system opportunities in larger cities, and especially in smaller ones. Urban, periurban and rural agriculture, as part of broader food systems, offer place-based, practice-centred solutions to common problems in the face of globalisation. This is also highlighted in the blog “The Eclectic Relation Between Jobs, Skills and Youth Migration“, which was based on this Community of Practice Youth meet-up in September.
This issue highlights several examples of food production and food systems work possibilities for young people with multiple livelihood benefits, such as on improved meaning and self-esteem, personal and food security through job and food access for youth. Many challenges for youth in the agrofood sector remain, though the issues shows examples of how these can be tackled. Such as in Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, difficult relations between youth and more senior farmers were addressed through mentorship models (page 40) or farmer training centres. This article was based on the explorative study by KIT, WCDI and YPARD on agricultural cooperatives.
The ‘resources’ section also includes a brief summary of this two-pager on Capitalizing on untapped potential: finding jobs for youth in Africa’s agricultural transformation.
The articles in this issue underscore the importance of valuing youth input into multi-stakeholder processes, to make space for youth to be leaders and active participants and to foster informed risk-taking. The complete magazine and each of the chapters can be found here.
Much appreciation to all the stakeholders supporting Youth in Urban farming because i’m also an Urban farmer, seeing organizations support urban farming gives me more hope in what i’m doing. thank you.