Engaging burgeoning youth populations in developing country agriculture is seen as an important strategy toward effective, efficient, and sustainable food system transformation. Yet the policy, institutional, technological, and capability barriers and ways to overcome them for successful participation of youth in agriculture are not fully understood. We use a conceptual framework that identifies key pathways to prosperity for youth and classifies contextual and driving factors that contribute to the success of youth engagement in agriculture. The framework comprises four broad categories of strategic interventions: policy and socioeconomic environment; institutional; technological/business infrastructure; and individual skills and capacities. In the context of this framework, we then present insights from cases of youth participation in agriculture in five countries: Guatemala, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Uganda. The countries and cases were purposively selected as part of ongoing research on youth engagement in agriculture. Policies and strategies play an important role in creating an enabling environment for youth engagement in agriculture, including by fostering transparency and accountability in the policy system and promoting youth engagement in the private sector through agricultural extension and other services. Institutions and intermediaries provide financial support, training, and access to market for youth entrepreneurs. Support in these areas should be strengthened. Systems approaches, such as multi-stakeholder platforms, provide holistic support to young agripreneurs (entrepreneurs in agriculture), but require effective coordination. Similarly, information and communication technologies can play a facilitating role by providing platforms to network and receive updated market information but need to be significantly scaled up. Individual capacities can drive youth engagement in agriculture and agripreneurship but must continue to be built up through expanded education and training on technical and functional skills. As policymakers and program managers search for interventions that can promote youth involvement in agriculture in their own countries, the insights from the five countries examined that are presented in this paper may be useful for identifying context-specific challenges and pathways to successful youth engagement in agriculture in their own countries. The framework presented here can be applied to study youth engagement issues in any country or in sub-national, decentralized contexts to generate evidence to guide the design of youth-in-agriculture development programs. There is a need to support, strengthen, and implement the driving factors identified in this paper for expanding youth engagement in agriculture.

About 1.5 billion people, most of the world’s poor, live on small farms in developing countries. Improving livelihoods requires investing in their “agriculture human capital”: skills, abilities and knowledge, social and personal attributes and experience to enable them to farm productively and sustainably. These include technical agricultural skills in crops and livestock, business skills in marketing, records, as well as functional skills such as empowerment, leadership, and innovation. There is high demand for human capital development but public agencies often cannot provide it and smallholders cannot afford to pay for it. There is great need for it as agriculture becomes more commercial, information- and skill-intensive and climate change increases weather hazards. This brief aims to assess the private sector’s role in developing smallholder human capital, and the advantages, limitations and challenges of this involvement. It outlines how development agencies and governments can facilitate the private sector to increase investment. The brief concludes with recommendations on how development agencies and governments can support and facilitate private sector investment. The main providers of non-formal agricultural train ing are extension and advisory services (EAS), mainly government, private companies, NGOs and farmer organizations. Other providers include agricultural technical and vocational education and training centres, on-the-job training such as internships, and informal interaction between farmers.

Investing in farmers – or agriculture human capital – is crucial to addressing challenges in our agrifood systems. A global study carried out by the FAO Investment Centre and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), with support from the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) and the FAO Research and Extension Unit, looks at agriculture human capital investments, from recent trends to promising initiatives. This toolkit aims to provide investors including policymakers, government officials, international and national development banks and the private sector, with the evidence, analysis, guidance and processes to make sounder investment decisions on projects, programmes and policies that strengthen farmers’ capacities. This publication is part of the Investment Toolkits series under the FAO Investment Centre's Knowledge for Investment (K4I) programme.

There are few wage-earning opportunities for the 223 million unemployed or underemployed youth in developing and emerging economies. Many of those young people are in rural areas where the local economy is largely agricultural. Agripreneurship – entrepreneurial activity in agriculture – increases youth employment while teaching them the hard and soft skills they need to manage enterprises profitably and sustainably. This improves their revenue, reduces business failure and fosters innovation in the agrifood systems of tomorrow. The brief explains the principles of investing wisely in such programmes for maximum benefit. This publication is part of the Investment Briefs series under the FAO Investment Centre’s Knowledge for Investment (K4I) programme.

Extension and advisory services (EAS) are well recognized as a key factor in contributing to agricultural productivity and growth. However, rigorous evaluation of EAS approaches and assessment of complex national or subnational pluralistic EAS systems are rare. This working paper examines the literature on experiential and empirical insights and explores methods to assess complex pluralistic EAS systems. The authors present conceptual thinking on innovation systems and EAS, and review the IFPRI “best-fit” framework. This framework remains relevant because it is based on a holistic perspective with an impact pathway orientation. The paper aims to operationalize and improve the best-fit framework to guide the evaluation of complex EAS systems. The authors draw on and summarize existing literature to illustrate methods and tools used to analyze each component of the framework. The review pays close attention to the literature and methods for assessing the diversity of service providers and their various delivery tools and learning approaches. The discussion also pays close attention to the interaction of each component and how it affects the performance and impact of EAS from a systems perspective. This paper adds key points and considerations on how to operationalize the best-fit framework to carry out evaluations of pluralistic EAS.