Youth are key players in tackling food security

“A roaring lion kills no game”. Africa is home to some of the most transformative initiatives on food security. From the Maputo declaration, to the Malabo declaration, to the AU Agenda 2063, Africa is a roaring lion.

Sadly, food insecurity continues to mount – with an estimated 240 million people going to bed hungry. While this is unacceptable, Africa loses food worth $48 billion annually and spends up to $35 billion importing food.

Way forward

This means an excess of $83 billion in food security and enterprise opportunities lost each year in Africa. The implication is simple — that solutions to Africa’s food insecurity cannot be found by focusing on agriculture as a silo. The solutions lie in value addition, where key enablers like decentralising clean energy to power value addition while ensuring we don’t pile on the emission responsible for climate change that threatens to lower yields by up to 40 per cent is critical. So how can these solutions be unlocked?

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First, in this era of global competitiveness, we must prioritise building of competitive enterprises that build inclusive wealth. One way to achieve this is leveraging in sectors of Africa’s global comparative advantage. These are what I call catalytic sectors and agriculture is at the core of this.

Combining clean energy developments to power agro-value addition stands out as Africa’s catalytic area. This strategic thrust area can create no less than 17 million assorted jobs along the entire clean energy powered agro-industrial value and supply chain and in ancillary sectors like logistics, ICT, marketing and financial services. Going forward, we need to create critical incentives to facilitate wealth creating enterprises for the youth.

Financial incentives: This is achievable through risk diversification schemes, the structure of which already exists in most countries - the cooperatives. Countries need to come up with policy incentives (eg tax exemption on income earned by financial institutions lending to enterprises in catalytic area; income tax exemptions for such cooperatives) specifically targeted at ensuring cooperatives prioritise giving cheap loans to enterprises engagedalong the sustainable agriculture led, clean energy powered industrialisation continuum.

Market incentives: Actors in the catalytic sectors must be assured of competitive access to market opportunities that will fuel growth of their enterprise. And for this, quality standards that benchmark produce from the catalytic area to ensure they compete on a par with conventional products is key. Here, we don’t have to re-invent the wheel, rather restructure enforcement of existing standards so they can be done in a cascade that covers interventions along the entire agro-value addition continuum. As opposed to being enforced in sectorial silos as classically approached. 

Policies are key

Policy Harmonisation: Policy is biggest driver of change. For above diverse operational level actors to converge, policies implementation must first converge. Africa must divest from silos in policy implementation. We have policies implemented in sectorial silos thus missing out on the potential for intersectoral synergies critical to delivering workable solutions that leverage on productivity maximisation of the catalytic sectors. In Kenya for instance, delivery of the Big 4 agenda – which captures food security as a key aspect, can benefit immensely from the interconnected implementation of policies.

This is already happening through UN Environment technical backstopping supporting establishment of what we call EBAFOSA interagency policy taskforces that convene implementation of complementary policies. Here, implementation of Kenya’s Climate Smart Agriculture Strategy, under the Ministry of Agriculture, is being connected to the Green Economy Strategy under the Ministry of Environment; the National Industrialisation Policy under the Ministry of Industry; provisions of the Finance Act — especially exemptions on inputs for manufacture of pesticides — under the National Treasury — for joint actions in local manufacture and use of organic fertilisers and pesticides.

Human capital

At the same time we must prioritise human capital as the premium resource for implementation and divest from upfront financing that we have been conditioned to. Africa is 60 per cent youthful and most of these youth are unemployed. Yet they have energy, skills, creativity, ongoing initiatives that can be harnessed to drive food security. The answer lies in one word – purpose. We must inculcate a mindset change among our youth such that they are driven to act by the desire to achieve a noble purpose. For this, youth will need to be mentored to see that any skill they have matters and can tap into the catalytic area and create enterprise opportunities for them while fulfilling a bigger purpose of driving the SDGs.

Already, the UN Environment through EBAFOSA is providing mentorship opportunities by pushing a mindset change message called Innovative Volunteerism. Youth can register and become active through www.innovativevolunteerism.org

Finally, winning the future is possible if we all give our all in everything we do. Let us now wake up and get to work so we can inclusively drive wealth creation for all. Let’s seize the moment!

[The writer is the UN Environment’s Africa climate change and Development Policy Expert. These are the authors’ views, not those of their institution]  

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