Agriculture is critical for Africa's future, as most of the population still relies on rural work and struggles to keep pace with the booming population. The sustained growth of the African agricultural sector is necessary to ensure employment and livelihoods, especially for youth. While urban areas continue to attract young people from the countryside, the manufacturing industry and service sectors do not seem to offer productive employment. Agriculture and agri-based industrialisation are now attracting renewed policy interest, while African youth tend to show increasing disaffection from this sector due to myriad challenges that remain unsolved over years. For the agricultural sector to be inclusive, youth need to ensure land access. There is also a need to address challenges related to uncertain titles, demographic pressure and land grabbing, lack of capital due to the underdeveloped financial sector, and unskilled human capital. This chapter discussed these issues and inter-relationships based on an extensive literature review.
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Agriculture and its development are critical for Africa's future, where the most population still relies on manual labour, amid struggles to keep pace with the booming population and rapid urbanization. Africa has ten to twelve million youth entering the workforce each year (UNDP, 2015). It is also the only continent where the number of people living in rural areas is still growing. Ensuring inclusive growth in the agricultural sector is recognized as necessary to ensure employment and sustainable livelihoods for most Africans, which is also important for regional and international stability and peace. Sustained demand for primary commodities and their price dynamics in the 21st century contributed to the attention of policymakers and international partners on agricultural growth and agri-based industrialization as a pathway for development. Most working youth in rural Sub-Saharan Africa are in agriculture. This chapter focuses on the future of African agriculture and the challenges that may prevent the youth from successfully engaging. The discussion considers a long-term structural change in the continent and the opportunities for youth to assess factors of production. It also offers perspectives on demography; population studies and considers relevant cultural issues. This multidisciplinary approach allows for an in-depth understanding of the dynamics in place.
The persistent growth of the African population poses a huge challenge to young people. While urban areas continue to attract young people, and young males particularly, from the countryside, the industry and service sector seem to not offer sustainable opportunities for productive employment in this area. Agriculture jointly with the service and agri-processing sectors is closely related to agricultural production, and these tend to offer better opportunities for development pathways in line with African factors endowment of land and work. For this reason, agriculture is attracting renewed policy interest. This can be seen in the NEPAD Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) of 2003 and the Malabo Declaration by the African Union of 2014. The agricultural sector driven by sustained domestic and international demand has the potential to create jobs for Africa's young people. Jobs' creation for young people is also linked to the Malabo commitment to accelerating agricultural growth and improving food security (Brooks et al. 2013), as 41% of working youth remain food insecure (AfDB and OECD, 2016). The continent is expected to feed itself and eradicate malnutrition by 2025, but its food trade balance had a deficit of 35 billion US dollars in 2015 (AfDB, 2016a).
In contrast with renewed political interest, African youth show increasing disaffection from the sector, which they tend to shy away from. This is due to cultural attitudes and the pull effects of urban lifestyles broadcast by increasing mediatic and ICT exposure and push effects. Push effects are related to important challenges that have remained unsolved over the years, such as rural poverty, lack of opportunities and access to productive resources. The chapter contributes to the discussion of bottlenecks and challenges to be addressed to ensure inclusive agricultural growth. It focuses on scarce factors of production, namely land, capital and human capital, to be made available to African youth. Access to agricultural land is challenged by uncertain titles, demographic pressure, absentee landlords, and foreign investors' land grabbing. Access to capital is often constrained by the underdeveloped financial sector, coupled with less skilled human capital, despite notable achievements in primary and higher education, which is failing to address the agricultural knowledge base.
The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part provides the background by discussing demographic trends in population growth and rural-urban migration, the model of consumption cities, based on low productivity, informal service sector, and the promising alternative offered by secondary urbanization, i.e., based on smaller urban centres, for the development of agri-based service and agricultural inputs, agri-processing sectors, along with food value chains.