Tailor-Made Development Pathways: A Framework to Enhance Active Participation of Youth in Agriculture

Abstract

The development of youth to actively engage in agriculture could address the persistent youth unemployment problem. For youth to actively engage in agriculture, adequate access to key productive resources is necessary. The main aim of this article is to develop and validate tailor-made development pathways based on the characteristics of four youth typologies, addressing the constrained access to key livelihood capitals, and to enhance the participation of youth in agriculture. The pathways are developed based on the Modified Sustainable Livelihood Framework (MSLF), which includes six livelihood capitals, namely, physical, natural, social, financial, human and psychological capitals. Four pathways were developed and named Business-oriented, Gender-oriented, Occupation-oriented and Livestock-oriented. Through focus group discussions, the pathways were validated to determine whether they can be used successfully to facilitate the participation of youths in agriculture. The results confirm that tailor-made development pathways can be used to develop youth characterised by the typology that informed that pathway, to actively engage in agriculture. The implementation of support strategies to support youth in agriculture, should therefore, be guided by the specific needs of different typologies. This allows for the coordination and coherence of youth support initiatives to enhance access to resources, which can yield improvements to desired development outcomes compared to initiatives implemented as piecemeals.