Promoting livelihood opportunities for rural youth - IFAD

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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
Page 1 and 2: Investing in the future Creating op
Page 3 and 4: Table of contents Introduction 4 Wh
Page 5 and 6: Introduction This paper 1 reviews t
Page 7 and 8: A worker packages decorative plants
Page 9 and 10: Who are rural youth? Age and locati
Page 11 and 12: Key features of rural youth livelih
Page 13 and 14: Future labour demand in rural areas
Page 15 and 16: Improving youth livelihoods in rura
Page 17: According to the sustainable liveli
Page 21 and 22: Training and capacity-building acti
Page 23 and 24: A young man makes and repairs shoes
Page 25 and 26: Partnerships to promote youth rural
Page 27 and 28: Concluding remarks The urgent need
Page 29 and 30: References Amin, S. (2008) Enhancin
Page 31: 30 International Fund for Agricultu

Promoting livelihood opportunities for rural youth - IFAD

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?