Promoting livelihood opportunities for rural youth - IFAD

Investing in the future
Creating opportunities for young rural people
Enabling poor rural people to overcome poverty
1

This paper was prepared by Paul Bennell, Senior Partner, Knowledge, Skills and
Development, Brighton, UK, in consultation with Maria Hartl, Technical Adviser for
Gender and Social Equity in IFAD’s Policy and Technical Advisory Division.
The following people reviewed the content: Annina Lubbock, Senior Technical Adviser
for Gender and Poverty Targeting, Policy and Technical Advisory Division;
Rosemary Vargas-Lundius, Senior Research Coordinator, Office of Strategy and
Knowledge Management; and Philippe Remy, Country Programme Manager,
West and Central Africa Division.
The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily
represent those of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
The designations employed and the presentation of material in this publication do
not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of IFAD concerning
the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or
concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The designations
“developed” and “developing” countries are intended for statistical convenience and
do not necessarily express a judgement about the stage reached by a particular
country or area in the development process. This publication contains material that
has not been subject to formal review. It is circulated to stimulate discussion and
critical comment.
Cover:
Young people harvest rice in the Wangdi area, Bhutan
©IFAD/A. Hossain
©2011 International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)
ISBN 978-92-9072-246-5
August 2011
2

Table of contents
Introduction 4
Who are rural youth? 8
Key features of rural youth livelihoods 10
Future labour demand in rural areas 12
Improving youth livelihoods in rural areas 14
Social capital and youth empowerment 16
Human capital – basic education 17
Human capital – skills training 18
Financial capital – microfinance and enterprise development 20
Public employment generation 23
Partnerships to promote youth rural livelihoods 24
Concluding remarks 26
References 28
Tables
1 Youth unemployment rates by region 1999 and 2009 7
Boxes
1 EGMM in Andhra Pradesh 11
2 The Rural Finance and Community Improvement Programme, Sierra Leone 17
3 Farmer Field Schools in East Africa 18
4 The San Francisco Agricultural School in Paraguay 19
5 Employment creation for rural youth in NENA 21

Abbreviations and acronyms
CIS
EGMM
EU
FAO
IFPRI
ILO
MDGs
NENA
PRSP
SSA
UWESO
WDR
YEN
Commonwealth of Independent States
Employment Generation and Marketing Mission
European Union
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
International Food Policy Research Institute
International Labour Office
Millennium Development Goals
Near East and North Africa
Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
Sub-Saharan Africa
Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans
World Development Report
Youth Employment Network
3

Introduction
This paper 1 reviews the situation of rural
youth in developing countries and presents
options for improving their livelihoods in
light of the many growing challenges they
face. The main geographical focus is
sub-Saharan Africa and the Near East and
North Africa.
Rural youth in developing countries make up
a very large and vulnerable group that is
seriously affected by the current international
economic crisis. Globally, three-quarters of
poor people live in rural areas, and about
one-half of the population are young people.
Climate change and the growing food crisis
are also expected to have a disproportionately
high impact on rural youth. The Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations (FAO) estimates that nearly half a
billion rural youth “do not get the chance to
realize their full potential” (FAO, 2009).
The 2005 International Labour Organization
(ILO) report on Global Employment Trends
for Youth states: “today’s youth represent a
group with serious vulnerabilities in the
world of work. In recent years, slowing global
employment growth and increasing
unemployment, underemployment and
disillusionment have hit young people
hardest. As a result, today’s youth are faced
with a growing deficit of decent work
opportunities and high levels of economic
and social uncertainty” (ILO, 2005).
The lack of decent employment rather than
open unemployment is the central issue in
the majority of rural locations. In overall
terms, four times as many young people earn
less than US$2 a day than are unemployed.
Youth are particularly vulnerable in conflict
and post-conflict countries. Very high youth
unemployment coupled with rapid
urbanization has fuelled civil conflict in
many countries.
It is widely recognized that smallholder
agriculture and non-farm production in
rural areas are among the most promising
sectors for youth employment in the
majority of developing countries. However,
harnessing this potential remains an
enormous challenge.
While the crisis of ‘youth unemployment’
(particularly in urban areas) has been a
persistent concern of politicians and
policymakers since the 1960s, youth
development has remained at the margins
of national development strategies in most
countries. We are now witnessing, however,
a resurgence of interest in youth, the reasons
for which stem from a growing realization
of the seriously negative political, social and
economic consequences stemming from the
precariousness of youth livelihoods.
For many, this amounts to a ‘youth crisis’,
the resolution of which requires innovative,
wide-ranging ‘youth-friendly’ policies and
implementation strategies.
1 The original version of this paper was shared as a
background paper at the round table on “Generating
remunerative livelihood opportunities for rural youth” at
the Thirtieth Session of IFAD’s Governing Council held
13-14 February 2007 in Rome, Italy. It has been revised to
take into account the latest developments in this area,
especially IFAD support for rural livelihood programming.
4

A member of a local cooperative
transplants seedlings in
Ambalatenina village, Madagascar
©IFAD/R. Ramasomanana

A worker packages decorative plants
cultivated in a greenhouse, Loreto
Corrientes, Argentina
©IFAD/G. Bizzarri

The United Nations’ Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) single out youth
as a key target group. Target 16 of the MDGs
is to develop and implement strategies for
decent and productive work for youth.
The 2007 World Development Report
published by the World Bank also focused
on youth.
The global population of young people aged
12-24 is about 1.3 billion. The youth
population is projected to peak at 1.5 billion
in 2035 and it will increase most rapidly in
sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and Southeast Asia
(by 26 per cent and 20 per cent respectively
between 2005 and 2035). FAO estimates that
about 55 per cent of youths reside in rural
areas, but this figure is as high as 70 per cent
in SSA and South Asia. In SSA, young people
aged 15-24 comprise 36 per cent of the entire
labour force, 33 per cent in the Near East and
North Africa (NENA), and 29 per cent in
South Asia. About 85 per cent of the
additional 500 million young people who
will reach working age during the next decade
live in developing countries. The global
economic downturn has accelerated the
growth of the rural youth population because
many young migrants to urban areas are
returning to their rural homes and other
young people are discouraged from migrating
to urban areas.
Globally, youth are nearly three times
more likely to be unemployed than adults
(ILO, 2010). 2 However, the incidence of youth
unemployment varies considerably from one
region to another. It is highest in the NENA
region, where nearly one-quarter of all youth
are classified as being unemployed. It is
lowest in East Asia and South Asia with rates
of 9.0 per cent and 10.7 per cent respectively.
Youth unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa
was 12.6 per cent in 2009 (table 1).
(Breakdowns of rural and urban youth
unemployment rates are not available.)
Particularly high rates of youth
unemployment are closely linked with
high rates of landlessness – for example,
20 per cent in NENA.
2 Young people aged 15-24 are estimated to account for
60 per cent of the unemployed in sub-Saharan Africa.
TABLE 1
Youth unemployment rates by region 1999 and 2009
Region 1999 2009
Developed economies and EU 13.9 17.7
Central and Eastern Europe and CIS 22.7 21.5
East Asia 9.2 9.0
South East Asia and Pacific 13.1 15.3
South Asia 9.8 10.7
Latin America and the Caribbean 15.6 16.6
Middle East 20.5 22.3
North Africa 27.3 24.7
Sub-Saharan Africa 12.6 12.6
Source: ILO, Global Employment Trends, 2010.
7

Who are rural youth?
Age and location are the two key defining
characteristics of rural youth. Age definitions
of youth vary quite considerably. The United
Nations defines youth as all individuals aged
between 15 and 24. The 2007 World
Development Report, which focuses on
‘the next generation’, expands the definition
of youth to include all young people aged
between 12 and 14. Similar definitional
variations exist with regard to location.
Distinguishing between who is rural and who
is urban is increasingly difficult, especially
with the expansion of ‘peri-urban’ areas
where large proportions of the population
rely on agricultural activities to meet their
livelihood needs.
Traditionally, policy discussions concerning
youth have been based on the premise that
youth are in transition from childhood to
adulthood and, as such, have specific
characteristics that make them a distinct
demographic and social category. This
transition is multi-faceted. It involves the
sexual maturation of individuals, their growing
autonomy, and their social and economic
independence from parents and other carers.
The nature of the transition from childhood
to adulthood has changed over time and
varies considerably from one region to
another. Rural children in developing
countries become adults quickly mainly
because the transition from school to work
usually occurs at an early age and is
completed in a short space of time. The same
is true for poor young rural women with
regard to marriage and childbearing. ‘Lack of
alternatives’ is the major reason given for very
high levels of marriage and childbearing
among rural adolescent girls. Rural survival
strategies demand that young people fully
contribute to meeting the livelihood needs
of their households from an early age.
Consequently, youth as a transitional stage
barely exists for the large majority of rural
youth, and the poor in particular. Many
children aged 5-14 also work (for example,
80 per cent in rural Ethiopia).
Another related attribute of rural youth is that
they tend to lack economic independence or
‘autonomy’. The rural household is a joint
venture, and the gender division of labour
is such that full, individual control of the
productive process is virtually impossible for
women in many countries. Given that large
proportions of rural youth are subordinate
members of usually large extended
households, they are largely dependent on
their parents for their livelihood needs.
As youth grow older, the autonomy of males
increases, but contracts for females. Moreover,
in most traditional and poorest populations
in low-income countries, girls typically marry
shortly after menarche or when they leave school.
Rural youth are also very heterogeneous.
The World Bank definition of youth
encompasses the 12 year-old pre-pubescent
boy attending primary school in a remote
rural area and a 24-year old single mother of
four children eking out an existence vending
on the streets of a large rural village. Since
8

their livelihood needs are markedly different,
they require very different sets or ‘packages’
of policy interventions. The same is true for
other distinct groups of rural disadvantaged
youth including the disabled, ex-combatants
and orphans. A clear separation also has to
be made between school-aged youth and
post-school youth. One of the main reasons
youth programming has attracted such little
support from governments, NGOs and donor
agencies is that post-school youth are usually
subsumed into the adult population as a
whole. The implicit assumption is, therefore,
that this group does not face any additional
problems accessing the limited support
services that are available for the adult
population as a whole. Nor do they have any
social and economic needs that relate
specifically to their age that would
give them priority over and above other
economically excluded and socially
vulnerable groups. The logical conclusion
of this line of argument is that, given the
limited relevance of youth as a distinct and
protracted transitional phase in most rural
areas coupled with the heterogeneity of
rural youth, youth may have limited
usefulness as a social category around which
major rural development policy initiatives
should be developed.
It is certainly the case that, with a few
exceptions (such as South Africa), youth as
a target group is not a major policy priority
of most governments in low-income
developing countries. Ministries of youth
are generally very poorly resourced and are
usually subsumed with other government
responsibilities, most commonly culture,
sports and education. With regard
to national poverty alleviation strategies,
youth receives very little attention in most
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs).
A 2005 overview of PRSPs conducted by the
Economic Commission for Africa concluded
that youth are still being overlooked.
In particular, the chapters in PRSPs on
agriculture rarely mention youth. Similarly,
the standard chapter on ‘crosscutting’ issues
focuses only on gender, environment and
HIV/AIDS. In only two out of 12 PRSPs for
African countries that were reviewed youth
is singled out as a special group in
mainstreaming employment, and, even
in these exceptional cases, urban youth is
of greater concern than rural youth. Even the
World Development Report on youth (2007),
devotes only four paragraphs to how to
expand rural opportunities for youth and
focuses mainly on rural non-farm activities.
Only a relatively small number of recent
IFAD projects specifically targeted youth.
These projects were mainly concentrated
in the NENA region, where levels of open
unemployment among rural youth are
particularly high. However, considerably
more attention is now being given to youth
programming, with a particular focus on
promoting youth employment through both
farm and non-farm enterprise development.
In the past, IFAD provided only limited
funding for capacity development, especially
skills training, for youth in agricultural
activities. In part, this was because there is
no specific education component in IFAD’s
core mandate, although vocational training is
offered across all agricultural specializations.
IFAD is, however, becoming increasingly
interested in providing support for targeted
training for young farmers.
9

Key features of rural
youth livelihoods
Most rural youth are either employed
(waged and self-employed) or not in the
labour force. The issue, therefore, is not so
much about unemployment, but serious
under-employment in low productivity,
predominantly household-based activities.
The ILO estimates that about 300 million
youths (one-quarter of the total) live on less
than US$2 a day. The unemployed are mainly
better educated urban youth who can afford
to engage in relatively protracted job searches.
It is better, therefore, to focus on improving
the livelihoods of the most disadvantaged
youth rather than those who are unemployed.
Access to key productive assets, particularly
land, is a critical issue for young people.
It is often argued (although usually not
based on robust evidence) that rural youth
are increasingly disinterested in smallholder
farming and tend to travel nationally and,
increasingly, across international borders,
in search of employment.
This exodus of young people from rural areas
is resulting in a marked ageing of the rural
population in some countries. In some
provinces in China, for example, the average
age of farmers is 45-50 years. Recent research
shows that migration from rural to urban
areas will continue on a large scale, and that
this is an essential part of the livelihood
coping strategies of poor rural people.
Temporary migration and commuting are
also a routine part of the combined
rural-urban livelihood strategies of poor
people across a wide range of developing
countries (Deshingkar, 2004). In many parts
of Asia and Africa, remittances from rural to
urban migration are overtaking the income
from agriculture. It is important, therefore,
that young people in rural areas are prepared
for productive lives in both rural and urban
environments. Policymakers should, in turn,
revise negative perceptions of migration and
view migration as socially and economically
desirable (see box 1).
10

BOX 1
EGMM in Andhra Pradesh
The Employment Generation and Marketing Mission (EGMM), which was established by the Andhra
Pradesh state government in India, is a good example of a successful, pro-migration employment
generation scheme for rural youth. It relies on an extensive network of 800,000 self-help groups that
works closely with the business community to help rural youth find formal-sector employment.
Rural academies provide short high-quality, focused training courses in retail, security, English, work
readiness and computers. Youth trained in the programme earn about three to four times the
income of a rural farm household in the state.
Rural youth tend to be poorly educated,
especially in comparison with urban youth.
The extent of ‘urban bias’ in the provision
of publicly funded education and training
services is large in most low-income
developing countries (see Bennell, 1999).
The deployment of teachers and other key
workers to rural areas amounts to nothing
less than a crisis in many countries. Poor
quality education, high (direct and indirect)
schooling costs, and the paucity of ‘good
jobs’ continue to dampen the demand for
education among poor parents.
Rural youth have been heavily involved
in civil wars, and other forms of conflict
in a growing number of countries, which
poses a major threat to the long-term
development prospects of these countries.
Traditional safety nets are breaking down
and rural youth expectations for a better life
are increasing, especially with access to global
information technologies.
Rural youth face major health problems,
including malnutrition, malaria and
HIV/AIDS. It is important, however, to keep
the direct health threat posed by HIV/AIDS
in proper perspective. Except for a handful
of very high prevalence countries,
HIV prevalence among rural teenagers
remains very low. In very large countries in
sub-Saharan Africa such as Ethiopia, Nigeria,
the Democratic Republic of the Congo and
all of Asia and Central and South America,
the incidence of HIV infection among rural
teenagers is well under one per cent.
The main impact of the AIDS epidemic on
rural youth livelihoods is the rapidly growing
number of children and youth whose parents
have died from AIDS-related illnesses.
As with the rural population as a whole,
rural youth are engaged in a diverse range
of productive activities, both agricultural and
non-agricultural. Statistics are limited, but the
proportions of rural youth engaged in waged
and self-employment in both these main areas
of activity varies considerably across countries.
The lack of access to basic infrastructure in
rural areas is also a key issue. In the majority
of countries in SSA, less than 10 per cent of
rural households have access to electricity and
less than half have access to drinking water
within 15 minutes of their homes.
The impact on youth can be particularly
severe. For example, girls and young
women are usually responsible for water
collection, and the lack of electricity
seriously limits training and other
employment creation opportunities.
11

Future labour demand
in rural areas
Over the coming decades, there will be much
debate and uncertainty about the roles and
contributions of the agricultural and rural
non-farm sectors in the development process.
It is impossible, therefore, to make robust
projections of future labour demand in rural
areas. Rural reality is changing fast in many
countries. Agriculture is increasingly
sophisticated and commercial, and a
growing share of rural incomes comes from
the non-farm economy. Many poor rural
people are part-time farmers or are landless.
It is widely recognized that rural diversification
will be the lynchpin of successful agricultural
transformation in the future. Where rural
diversification is not economically feasible, the
alternative will be the transition of economic
activity from rural to urban areas. Whatever the
outcome, rural youth will be at the forefront
of this process of change.
Rural non-farm activities account for a large
and growing share of employment and
income, especially among the poor and
women who lack key assets, most notably
land. The rural non-farm sector is seen as the
‘ladder’ from under employment in lowproductivity
smallholder production to
regular wage employment in the local
economy and from there to jobs in the
formal sector. The key policy goals for the
rural non-farm sector are to identify the key
engines of growth, focus on sub sectorspecific
supply chains, and build flexible
institutional coalitions of public and private
agencies (see Haggblade et al 2002).
Traditionally, manpower planners have
assumed that increased demand for labour
in a particular sector, such as smallholder
agriculture, depends on the projected rate
of growth of output and the elasticity of
employment with respect to output for that
specific sector. However, in countries without
unemployment benefit systems, these
assumptions generally do not apply. 3
Consequently, an increase in the demand
for labour is reflected in an increase in the
quality rather than the quantity of
employment: workers move from unpaid to
wage jobs, from worse jobs to better jobs, etc.
Subsistence agriculture and informal sectors
are ‘sponges’ for surplus labour. Also, the
traditional manpower planning analysis sets
up a false conflict between increasing
productivity and increasing employment.
It leads employment planners to talk about
the threat posed to jobs of too fast growth in
productivity, whereas the process is entirely the
opposite. Increasing productivity is at the centre
stage for any strategy to increase the quality of
employment (Godfrey, 2005 and 2006).
Growth in productive-sector wage
employment is a source of dynamism in the
labour market as a whole. When wage
employment increases, the self-employed in
both rural and urban areas, also face less
competition for assets and customers and enjoy
an increase in the demand for their products.
3 This is because total employment is largely supply
determined and employment elasticities of demand tend to
vary inversely with output growth.
12

The regions that have been most successful
recently in increasing demand for labour and
reducing the incidence of poverty are those
where the share of productive-sector wage
earners in total employment has been rising.
Unless demand for labour is expanding it is
very difficult to design and implement
programmes to increase the integrability
of disadvantaged youth.
Boosting labour demand will depend on
promoting growth sectors in the rural
economy in line with dynamic comparative
advantage (which will be natural resourcebased
in most countries) supported by an
appropriate macroeconomic policy framework.
Young women collect water,
Dan Bako village, the Niger
©IFAD/D. Rose

Improving youth livelihoods
in rural areas
A clear distinction should be made between,
on the one hand, social and economic
policies that are not specifically targeted at
youth, but nonetheless benefit youth, either
directly or indirectly, and, on the other hand,
youth-specific policies that do target youth
as a whole or groups of youth. It is widely
alleged that youth development is at the
periphery of the development agenda in most
countries. And yet, given that youth comprise
such a large proportion of the rural labour
force, most development projects and
programmes in rural areas do promote youth
livelihoods to a large extent. Youth is the
primary client group for education and training
programmes as well as health and health
prevention activities. Even so, participatory
assessments often show that rural communities
want more youth-focused activities.
The 2007 World Development Report (WDR)
on youth concludes that youth policies often
fail. Youth policies in developing countries
have frequently been criticized for being
biased towards non-poor, males living in
urban areas. Given the paucity of youth
support services in many countries, they
tend to be captured by non-poor youth.
For example, secondary school-leavers in
SSA have increasingly taken over rural
training centres originally meant for primary
school-leavers and secondary school
dropouts. National youth service schemes
enrol only university graduates and
occasionally secondary school leavers,
most of who are neither poor or from rural
areas. Many schemes have been scrapped during
the last given deepening fiscal crises coupled
with the relatively high costs of these schemes.
The World Bank’s 2007 global inventory
of interventions to support young workers is
based on 289 documented projects and other
interventions in 84 countries. However, only
13 per cent of the projects were in SSA and
NENA and less than 10 per cent of
interventions were targeted exclusively in
rural areas. Two other notable findings are
the predominance of skills training
interventions and the very limited robust
evidence available on project outcomes and
impacts (Betcherman et al, 2007).
A common misconception of youth policy
has been that boys and girls are a
homogeneous group. Uncritical focusing on
youth could, therefore, divert attention away
from the gender agenda since female and
male youth often have conflicting interests.
Rural adolescent girls are virtually trapped
within the domestic sphere in many
countries. Because boys spend more time
in productive activities that generate income,
they are more visible and are more likely,
therefore, to be supported.
Sexual reproductive health issues have
increasingly dominated youth policy during
the last decade. Up to the 1990s, the main
preoccupation of governments and donors was
to reduce youth fertility rates (through later
marriage and smaller families). Since then, the
focus (in at least in SSA) has shifted to reducing
the risks of HIV infection among youth.
14

Children harvest lotus flowers
in Galgamuwa, Sri Lanka
©IFAD/G.M.B. Akash
At the most general level, youth employment
policies should focus on (i) increasing the
demand for labour in relation to supply;
and (ii) increasing the ‘integrability’ of
disadvantaged youth so that they can take
advantage of labour market and other
economic opportunities when they arise.
There are three main aspects of youth
integration namely, remedying or
counteracting market failure (labour, credit,
location, training systems), optimizing labour
market regulations, and improving the skills
of disadvantaged youth.
There is a fairly standard list of policy
interventions to improve the livelihoods
of rural youth that are enumerated in policy
discussions as well as in policy documents
and the academic literature. The United
Nation’s World Programme of Action for
Youth, which was originally promulgated
in 1995, identifies the following ‘fields of
action’: education, employment, hunger
and poverty, health, environment, drug
abuse, juvenile delinquency and leisure.
Youth livelihood improvement programmes
typically distinguish between interventions
that improve capabilities and resources
(especially education, health, ‘life skills’,
training and financial services/credit) and
those that structure opportunities (individual
and group income generation activities,
promoting access to markets, land,
infrastructure and other services), the
protection and promotion of rights and the
development of youth institutions.
There is also increasing awareness of the
inter-relatedness and linkages between
different kinds of interventions for youth.
In particular, in the context of the AIDS
epidemic, it is contended that improved
youth livelihoods may reduce the incidence
of high-risk ‘transactional’ sexual
relationships, which are mainly motivated by
material gain (the ‘sex-for-food, food-for-sex’
syndrome). Integrated programming is,
therefore, desirable, but is complicated, both
with to programme design and implementation.
15

According to the sustainable livelihoods
approach, the livelihood ‘capital assets’ of
rural youth can be broken down into the
following four main types: political and
social, physical and natural, human and
financial. A wide range of livelihood
improvement interventions has been
undertaken with respect to these asset types.
IFAD’s core mandate focuses mainly on
strengthening the productive base of rural
households and, as such, is most directly
related to interventions that improve physical
and natural and financial assets as well as jobrelated
human capital through skills training.
The available evidence strongly suggests that
comprehensive multiple services approaches
(such as the Jovenes programmes in South
America) are more effective than fragmented
interventions for generating sustainable
employment opportunities for youth. However,
such approaches are relatively expensive, which
continues to limit their applicability in most
low-income developing countries.
Social capital and youth empowerment
Youth, especially in rural areas, do not
usually constitute an organized and vocal
constituency with the economic and social
power to lobby on their own behalf.
Consequently, empowering rural youth to
take an active role in agriculture and rural
development is critical. Successful youth
policies also depend on effective
representation by youth. Traditionally, despite
their size, rural youth have had limited social
and political power. Older people, and
especially older males, tend to dominate
decision-making at all levels in rural societies.
In SSA, some writers refer to this as a
gerontocracy. The subordinate position of
youth has been further compounded by the
traditional welfare approach – youth are
viewed as presenting problems that need to
be solved through the intervention of older
people. It is now widely accepted, however,
that youth can play a major role in improving
governance nationally and locally, and in
implementing key economic and social
policies. In particular, rural youth should be
at the forefront of efforts to broaden
opportunities for rural people. Urban bias
with respect to macro-, sector- and meso-level
policies and related resource allocations is
also likely to become even more acute as the
problems in urban areas increase and needs
to be countered. Well-designed interventions
are required to build up the political and
social capital of rural youth. Youth have to
be mobilized so that they are able to
participate fully and gain ownership over
youth development strategies and policies.
This becomes even more challenging for
young people who are under 18 and who are,
therefore, still considered to be children.
New ways of working with young people
in rural areas are being pioneered in many
countries. Rural youth organizations and
networks should be established and
strengthened. There are many exciting
developments in this area. For example, the
IFAD-funded Rural Youth Talents Programme
in South America is based on a new strategy
that seeks to systematize and publicize the
experiences and lessons learned from rural
youth programming. The ILO-supported
Youth-to-Youth Fund in Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea,
Liberia, Sierra Leone and three East African
countries (Kenya, Uganda and the United
Republic of Tanzania) also demonstrates how
youth-led organizations can effectively
promote rural-based farming and non-farming
enterprises. The Mercy Corps Youth
Transformation Framework has adopted a
similar approach in 40 fragile environment
countries. Community Action Plans have been
successfully piloted in Jordan, which map
youth livelihood opportunities with the
greatest potential and foster an entrepreneurial
mindset with a strong focus on life-skills
training. The provision of financial services
for rural youth in Sierra Leone is another
pioneering initiative (see box 2).
16

BOX 2
The Rural Finance and Community Improvement Programme,
Sierra Leone
The objective of this initiative is to help poor rural people, especially youth, gain access to
financial services by establishing financial services associations. Each formally registered
association enables rural communities to access a comprehensive range of financial services.
It capitalizes on informal local rules, customs, relationships, local knowledge and solidarity, while
introducing formal banking concepts and methods. The current associations are wholly managed
by young people. Each association has a manager and a cashier selected by the programme from
the local community.
Human capital – basic education
Nearly 140 million youths in developing
countries are classified as ‘illiterate’. More
generally, the preparation of rural youth for
productive work is poor (see Atchorarena and
Gasperini, 2009). According to the 2007
World Development Report, ‘changing
circumstances’ mean that much greater
attention needs to be given to the human
capital needs of youth. These “include new
health risks, the changing nature of politics
and the growth of civil society, globalization
and new technologies, expansion in access to
basic education and the rising demand for
workers with higher education”.
There is no simple, direct link between
education and employment. However, the
best way to improve the future employment
and livelihood prospects of disadvantaged
young people in both rural and urban areas
is to ensure that they stay in school until they
are least functionally literate and numerate.
Expanding girl’s education is the most
obvious lever to change the situation of
young women. In the majority of low-income
developing countries, however, rural youth
still do not acquire these basic competencies.
In Ethiopia, for example, nearly threequarters
of 15-24 year olds have no
schooling. In SSA and South Asia more
than one-third of youth were still classified as
illiterate in 2002. The availability of primary
schooling in rural areas is improving rapidly
in many countries, but the quality of
education remains generally very low and
is even declining in some countries.
There are also major concerns about
the relevance of schooling in rural areas.
Curricula are criticized for not adequately
preparing children for productive rural lives
and, worse still, fueling youth aspirations to
move to urban areas. Calls persist for the
vocationalization of schooling in rural areas,
despite the fact that previous initiatives to
do so have failed in most countries for
both supply and demand-side reasons.
Governments and other providers should,
therefore, focus on delivering reasonable
quality basic education. The current push for
eight years of universal basic education in
most countries means that most children will
not complete their schooling until they are
15-16 years old.
17

BOX 3
Farmer Field Schools in East Africa
FAO, other UN agencies and NGOs are supporting the establishment of Farmer Field Schools in
East Africa. The schools combine FAO’s popular Farmer Field School teaching methodology, which
is designed to teach adult farmers about the ecology of their fields through first-hand observation
and analysis, and the Farmer Life School, which uses similar analytical techniques to teach human
behaviour and AIDS prevention.
A recently conducted comprehensive impact evaluation of Farmer Field Schools in Kenya, Uganda
and the United Republic of Tanzania by a team from the International Food Policy Research Institute
(IFPRI) concluded that participation increased income by 61 per cent across the three countries as
a whole. The most significant change was for crop production in Kenya (80 per cent increase) and
in the United Republic of Tanzania for agricultural income (more than a 100 per cent increase).
The main reason for these positive impacts is that adoption of new agricultural technologies and
innovations is significantly higher among farmers who attend the schools. Another key finding is
that younger farmers are more likely to participate in the schools than older farmers in all three
countries and that female-headed households benefited significantly more than male-headed
households in Uganda (Davis, 2009).
Given the endemic problems of rural
schooling with high drop-out rates, support
for non-formal education programmes has
increased considerably during the last decade.
For example, Morocco’s Second Chance
schools target 2.2 million children between
8 and 16 years old who have never attended
school or have not completed the full
primary cycle. More than three-quarters of
this group live in rural areas and about
45 per cent are girls. The Bangladesh Rural
Advancement Committee model of nonformal
education is now being replicated in
a number of countries, including several
in sub-Saharan Africa.
Human capital – skills training
The rural world is changing rapidly in most
countries. Rural youth must, therefore, be
equipped with the requisite skills to exploit
new opportunities. However, the provision of
good quality post school skills training (both
pre-employment and job-related) remains
very limited in most rural areas. The key issue
in many countries is that national vocational
training systems have been unable to deliver
good quality and cost-effective training to
large numbers of both school leavers and the
currently employed. It is essential, therefore,
that all training is based on precise assessments
of job opportunities and skill requirements.
Many governments would like to establish
extensive networks of rural training
institutions, but do not have the necessary
resources to do this. Most evaluations have
found that the cost-effectiveness of youthrelated
rural training is generally low
(Middleton et al, 1993 and Bennell, 1999).
Typically, training services are fragmented and
there is no coherent policy framework to
provide the basis of a pro-poor rural training
system. There are some notable exceptions,
mainly in South America – for example,
18

BOX 4
The San Francisco Agricultural School in Paraguay
The San Francisco Agricultural School is run by the Fundacion Paraguaya. The school’s curriculum
combines the teaching of traditional high-school subjects and technical skills with the running of
17 small-scale rural enterprises, most of which are based on the school’s campus. All enterprises
are strictly based on existing market demands and, for this reason, the income generated from
them covers all the running costs of the school, including teacher salaries and depreciation. All of its
students are productively engaged either in wage employment or self-employment within four
months of graduation. Teacher accountability is very high because their own salaries are directly
dependent on the immediate success of the school’s enterprises (ILO, 2008).
the countrywide rural training and business
support organization, SENAR, in Brazil.
The key challenges in providing high-quality
training and extension services for rural youth
are low educational levels, poor learning
outcomes, scattered populations, low effective
demand (from both the self-employed and
employers) and limited scope for costrecovery.
Church organizations and NGOs
have supported much of the vocational
training for rural school leavers in many
developing countries, but funding constraints
have resulted in significantly reduced
enrolments in many countries during the last
decade. The stigma attached to vocational and
technical education is another major issue in
most countries. Poor employment outcomes
are a common weakness of rural training
programmes. For example, about one-half
of the young people who participated in the
India-wide Training of Rural Youth for
Self-Employment have been unable to
find employment. However, some training
initiatives have been very successful. Farmer
Field Schools in East Africa and the Fundacion
Paraguaya are notable examples (see boxes 3
and 4). In Uganda, the Programme for the
Promotion of the Welfare of Children and
Youth has provided good quality training,
particularly in remote rural and war affected
areas. Colombia and Nicaragua also have
successful rural training programmes for youth.
The capacity of service providers to support
rural clienteles, especially rural youth, in all
key sectors – such as education, health,
policing, justice, rural infrastructure and
agricultural extension – needs to be
strengthened significantly in most
countries, which has major implications for
higher education and training systems.
Agricultural education at all levels also
needs to be revitalized.
19

Training and capacity-building activities
now comprise an important component of
IFAD-supported activities and absorb up to
30 per cent of resources in some projects.
Since key target groups are often illiterate or
have little formal schooling, this presents
additional challenges for providing effective
training. A good example of IFAD support
in this area is the Skills Enhancement for
Employment Project in western Nepal,
which targets Dalit and other seriously
disadvantaged rural youth. The project has an
ambitious goal of ensuring that 70 per cent
of all trainees are in productive employment
after six months. The project is implemented
by ILO and is based on the ILO’s Training for
Economic Empowerment methodology,
which is firmly rooted in participatory
planning approaches and market-driven
enterprise development. The Prosperer project
in Madagascar is another good example of a
new generation of youth-oriented projects
being funded by IFAD. It seeks to improve the
income of disadvantaged, poor youth in three
regions of the country by providing
diversified income-generating opportunities
and promoting entrepreneurship in rural
areas. A total of 8,000 young people will be
supported over the next five years.
Access to land and natural resources and land
tenure security lie at the heart of all rural
societies and agricultural economies and are
central to rural poverty eradication. Growing
populations, declining soil fertility and
increasing environmental degradation, the
HIV/AIDS pandemic and new opportunities
for agricultural commercialisation, have all
heightened demands and pressures on land
resources and placed new pressures on land
tenure systems, often at the expense of poor
people and vulnerable groups such as women
and youth. In many developing countries
inheritance remains the main means for
young people to access land. Typically,
though, it is sons who inherit land, and
daughters only gain access to land through
marriage. Ongoing subdivision of land
through inheritance has resulted in
fragmented and unviable land parcels and
increasingly the youth are becoming landless.
The HIV/AIDS pandemic has resulted in
increasing land grabbing of widows’ and
orphans’ lands by male relatives of the
deceased, particularly in Africa. Increasing
landlessness amongst the youth has resulted
in an increase in inter-generational conflicts
over land. Lasting solutions to land tenure
insecurity of the youth could include:
the strengthening of legislation and legal
services to women and youth in order to
recognize and defend their rights to land;
the development of land markets as
mechanisms for accessing land; and perhaps
most importantly, the identification and
promotion of off-farm economic activities
that target the youth.
Young people tend to view agriculture as
an unsatisfactory option unless they have
secure control over family lands. In the
United Republic of Tanzania, as part of the
national action plan for youth employment,
labour intensive rural infrastructure
development has been actively supported
among youth groups in ‘green belts’ around
major urban centres. The programme has also
supported youth to own land by allocating
areas for youth infrastructure development
and enacting laws to protect youth from
discrimination in leasing land.
Financial capital – microfinance and
enterprise development
As the 2005 World Youth Report points out
“entrepreneurship is not for everyone and so
cannot be viewed as a large-scale solution to
the youth employment crisis”. Nonetheless,
there is growing interest in the targeted
provision of micro-finance for youth, because
it is recognized that, education and training
do not on their own usually lead to
sustainable self-employment. To date,
however, services in this area remain limited.
Numerous problems have been encountered
in pilot projects. The lack of control of loans
20

Women attend a literacy class in Qusiva village,
Syrian Arab Republic
©IFAD/J. Spaull
BOX 5
Employment creation for rural youth in NENA
Sizeable enterprise development projects for young people are being funded by IFAD in Egypt and
the Syrian Arab Republic. In Egypt, the focus is mainly on agro-processing and marketing activities
in key high value and organic agricultural export sectors. Private banks will manage loans and close
links will be established with agricultural exporters. The project is being implemented through
community development organizations, which will take the lead in identifying youth participants. It is
expected that 30,000 jobs will be created by the project during its eight-year lifetime. The project in
the Syrian Arab Republic focuses on promoting youth enterprise in agricultural marketing activities in a
poor area of the country.
21

A young man makes and repairs
shoes in Ruhengeri Town, Rwanda
©IFAD/M. Millinga

y youth borrowers is a major issue, screening
mechanisms are weak, and intensive training
is needed in how to make best use of the
money. Youth, and especially the very poor,
are also frequently reluctant to borrow
money. Integrated packages of inputs
(credit, training, advisory support, other
facilities) are often necessary, but this
imposes major demands on organizations
and significantly reduces the number of
beneficiaries. Agricultural and enterprise
development extension staff should be
trained more to work with young people.
The recent experience of the Population
Council with microcredit schemes for youth
highlights the overriding importance of
specific contextual factors in determining
outcomes and impacts. In other words, what
works in one place may fail completely in
another (Amin, 2010). One of the largest
youth credit schemes is currently being
funded by IFAD in the Chongqing Province
in China, where more than 100,000 returned
migrant workers have been provided with
microfinance and training in order to start
a variety of agricultural and rural enterprises.
IFAD provides substantial support for nonfarm
enterprise development, but most
projects in this area have not (at least until
very recently) had any specific focus on rural
youth. Nonetheless, youth have benefited
from these interventions. The success of
what has become a national network of
village banks in Benin is a good example.
Similarly, as part of the IFAD-funded rural
enterprise project in Rwanda, 60 per cent of
the 3,500 young people who completed sixmonth
apprenticeships either started their
own enterprises or continued to work as
full-time employers in the enterprise where
they were apprenticed. In Uganda, IFAD
(through the Belgian Survival Fund) provided
US$3 million funding between 2000 and
2004 to the development programme of
the Uganda Women’s Effort to Save
Orphans (UWESO). Loans were made to
7,000 households with orphan members,
with an overall loan recovery rate of
95 per cent. In addition, 655 orphans were
trained as artisans. However, as is invariably
the case with project-elated training activities,
insufficient data is available about the
subsequent employment activities of these
trainees to be able to reach firm conclusions
about the cost-effectiveness of this training.
Public employment generation
Rural public works programmes are
substitutes for unemployment benefit or
income support systems in countries that
cannot afford such systems. If properly
designed, they can perform the role of a
guaranteed employment scheme for the
disadvantaged of all ages and they can be
used to identify self-selecting groups of young
workers who are most in need. However, a
key conclusion of the World Bank Youth
Inventory study is that “few public works
programmes targeted on youth seem to lead to
high employment chances for participants”
(Betcherman et al, 2007).
23

Partnerships to promote
youth rural livelihoods
A broad consensus exists that the rapid
scaling up of rural youth development
policies and programmes must be based
on a multi sector approach with close
coordination and partnerships between
a wide array of public and private
organizations. Youth networks and
partnerships have to be established and
effectively used at local, national and
international levels.
The presence and impact of international
and national youth development
organizations and initiatives continues to
expand rapidly in all developing country
regions. There are already a number of
international global networks that focus
on youth development. The FAO Rural Youth
Development Programme is expected to play
a major coordinating role, but lack of
resources has prevented it from doing so in
recent years. The Youth Employment Network
(YEN), which was launched jointly by the
United Nations, the World Bank and the
ILO in 2001 to address the problem of
unemployment among young people has
been increasingly active. Currently, there are
21 YEN Lead Countries, all of which have
developed comprehensive national action
plans for youth employment. The Network
is also expected to regularly benchmark youth
policies and programmes. The Commonwealth
Plan of Action for Youth Empowerment is
another similar international initiative. An
Inter-Agency Network on Youth Development
has also been recently established by the UN.
The International Youth Foundation, which is
the most prominent international civil society
organization in this area, seeks to mobilize
the global community of businesses,
governments and civil society organizations.
To date, it has provided grants to nearly
350 organizations in 86 countries. Major
corporate sponsors include Merrill Lynch,
Microsoft, Starbucks, Samsung and Nokia.
Its highest profile initiatives are Entra 21,
which equips disadvantaged youth in
Latin America and the Caribbean with
information and communication technology
and life skills, and its Global Partnership
to Promote Youth Employment and
Employability. However, most of its
programmes are oriented mainly to formalsector
employment in urban areas. Poorer
countries also tend to be under-represented
in its activities.
Establishing effective national youth
development strategies is a major challenge.
As the 2007 World Development Report
notes, “influencing youth transitions requires
working across many sectors, yet few
24

countries take a coherent approach to
establish clear lines of responsibility and
accountability for youth outcomes.”
There is a need for long-term coordinated
interventions, which are part and parcel of
a much broader national integrated strategy
for rural development, growth and job creation.
At both the national or subnational level,
where rural youth can be identified as a highpriority
social category with distinct
development and livelihood improvement
needs, IFAD should concentrate on
developing strategic partnerships with other
organizations that focus on improving the
livelihoods of youth, and rural youth in
particular. This is especially important in
IFAD’s own core areas of mandated activity,
namely increasing agricultural and non
agricultural productivity and employment
and income generation. However, IFAD
should also contribute to policy formulation
and implementation in other key areas,
such as curriculum development for
agriculture courses.
A worker grinds cassava in a
local business in Wenchi,
Ghana
©IFAD/P. Maitre

Concluding remarks
The urgent need to intensify development
efforts on rural youth is increasingly
recognized by governments, civil society
organizations and international development
agencies. This is reflected in a variety of
exciting new initiatives that seek to improve
the livelihoods of disadvantaged rural youth.
The overriding challenge is to unleash the
energy and creativity of young people living
in rural areas, especially those who are the
most marginal and vulnerable. Rural youth,
and especially young women, need to be
empowered to become agents of innovation
and social actors capable of developing new,
viable models of rural development.
IFAD is increasing its support for rural youth
programming. As part of this effort, IFAD is
collaborating with the ILO to review
strategies and programmes for promoting
productive employment among rural youth
in developing countries. Given the enormous
challenges these young people face,
this support should be intensified in the future
with rural youth mainstreamed in all IFAD
policies and programmes.
The development of coherent, comprehensive
national policies on rural youth should
become a top priority for all governments,
but this must be backed up with more
research. The prominence of national action
plans for youth employment should also be
increased, and it is essential that they are fully
embedded in other key national planning
documents, especially PRSPs. This should be
closely linked with increased efforts to promote
youth participation in all areas of policymaking.
Finally, the knowledge base of what works
needs to be strengthened rapidly, especially
with regard to innovative, strongly pro-poor
rural youth development programmes and
projects that have been successfully scaled-up.
26

A young woman sells vegetables at a market
in La Trinidad, Philippines.
©IFAD/GMB Akash

References
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Brief no. 17, Washington D.C., Population Council.
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Bennell, P.S. (1999) Learning to change: skills development among the economically vulnerable and
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Bennell, P.S. (2000) Improving youth livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa: a review of policies and
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World Bank.
28

Contact
Maria Hartl
Technical Advisor
Policy and Technical Advisory Division
IFAD
E-mail: m.hartl@ifad.org
29

30
International Fund for
Agricultural Development
Via Paolo di Dono, 44
00142 Rome, Italy
Tel: +39 06 54591
Fax: +39 06 5043463
E-mail: ifad@ifad.org
www.ifad.org
www.ruralpovertyportal.org