Investing in the future: Creating opportunities for young rural ... - IFAD

Investing in the future
Creating opportunities for young rural people

Investing in the future
Creating opportunities for young rural people
Paul Bennell
December 2010
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.

ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
CIS
EGMM
EU
FAO
IFPRI
ILO
MDGs
NENA
NGO
PRSP
RNF
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
The United Nations‟ Millennium Development Goals
Near East and North Africa
Non-governmental organization
Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
Rural non-farm
Sub-Saharan Africa
Uganda Women‟s Effort to Save Orphans
World Development Report
Youth Employment Network

INTRODUCTION
This paper 1 reviews the situation of rural youth in developing countries and
presents options for improving their livelihoods in the face 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 the poor 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: p.1). 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 who 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 realisation 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.
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.
1 The original version of this paper was presented at the 2007 IFAD Governing Board
Meeting in Rome. It has been revised to take into account the latest developments in this
area, especially IFAD support for rural livelihood programming.
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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 youth 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 onequarter
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.
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
North Africa
20.5
27.3
22.3
24.7
Sub-Saharan Africa 12.6 12.6
Source: ILO, Global Employment Trends, 2010.
A. 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
2 Young people aged 15-24 are estimated to account for 60 per cent of the unemployed in sub-
Saharan Africa.
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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 and their growing autonomy 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 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 why youth programming has attracted so 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 an 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
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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 lowincome
developing countries. Ministries of Youth are generally very poorly
resourced and are usually subsumed (or combined) 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 current World Development
report on youth, 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 nonfarm
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.
B. 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 youth (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
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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 the rural
poor. Temporary migration and commuting are also a routine part of the
combined rural-urban livelihood strategies of the poor 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).
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 to 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, 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.
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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 selfemployment
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.
C. 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 of the
rural poor 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 (RNF) 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 RNF sector is seen as the „ladder‟ from
under-employment in low-productivity 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 RNF sector are to identify the key engines of growth,
focus on sub sector-specific 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
3 This is because total employment is largely supply determined and employment elasticities of
demand tend to vary inversely with output growth.
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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. 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
resource-based in most countries) supported by an appropriate macroeconomic
policy framework.
D. 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, policies that
do target youth as a whole or groups of youth i.e. are youth-specific. 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 schoolleavers
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
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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.
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), optimising 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.
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
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of rural households and, as such, is most directly related to interventions that
improve physical and natural and financial assets as well as job-related 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 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 (Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya) 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).
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The Rural Finance and Community Improvement
Programme, Sierra Leone
The objective of this initiative is to help the rural poor, 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 youth 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, globalisation 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 three-quarters 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 criticised for not adequately preparing children for productive rural
lives and, worse still, fuel youth aspirations to move to urban areas. Calls persist
for the vocationalisation 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.
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
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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 non-formal education is now being replicated in 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 preemployment
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 youth-related 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, 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 cost-recovery. 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). 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.
11

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 firsthand 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, Tanzania and Uganda 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 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).
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 selfemployment
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).
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
12

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 incomegenerating
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 the poor 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 sub-division 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 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 - micro-finance 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‟ (p.59). 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 by 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 organisations and significantly reduces the number of
beneficiaries. Agricultural and enterprise development extension staff should be
much trained to work with young people.
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The recent experience of the Population Council with micro-credit 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 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 non-farm 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 six-month 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 AIDS 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.”
Employment creation for rural youth in NENA
Sizeable enterprise development projects for young people are
being funded by IFAD in Egypt and Syria. 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 Syria focuses on promoting youth enterprise in agricultural
marketing activities in a poor area of the country.
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F. 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 underrepresented
in its activities.
Establishing effective national youth development strategies is a major
challenge. As the current World Development Report notes, “influencing youth
transitions requires working across many sectors, yet few 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 sub-national level, where rural youth can be identified as
a high-priority 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.
15

G. 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 policy making.
Finally, the knowledge base of what works needs to be strengthened rapidly,
especially with regard to innovative, strongly pro-poor rural youth development
projects and programmes that have been successfully scaled-up.
16

REFERENCES
Amin, S. (2008) Enhancing the benefits of girls‟ livelihood strategies. Transitions
to Adulthood Brief no. 17, Washington D.C., Population Council.
Atchoarena, D. and L. Gasperini (2009) Education for rural development:
towards new policy responses, Rome, FAO.
Bennell, P.S. (1999) Learning to change: skills development among the
economically vulnerable and socially excluded in developing countries, Geneva,
ILO.
Bennell, P.S. (2000) Improving youth livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa: A review
of policies and programmes with particular reference to the link between sexual
behaviour and economic well being, Ottawa, IDRC/USAID.
Betcherman, G., M. Godfrey, S. Puerto, F. Rother and A. Stavreska (2007) A
review of interventions to support young workers: findings of the Youth
Employment Inventory. Social Protection Discussion Paper No. 7015. Washington
D.C., World Bank.
Davis, S., E. Nkonya, E. Kato, D.Ayalew, M. Odendo, R. Miiro and J. Nkuba
(2009) Impact of Farmer Field Schools on agricultural productivity, poverty and
farmer empowerment in East Africa. Washington, IFPRI.
Deshingkar, P. (2004) Understanding the implications of migration for pro-poor
agricultural growth, London, Overseas Development Institute.
FAO (2009) Rural youth: tapping the potential. FAO Rural Youth Development
Programme. Rome, FAO.
Freedman, D. (2008) Improving skills and productivity of disadvantaged youth.
ILO Employment Sector Working Paper No. 7. Geneva, ILO.
Godfrey, M (2006) Youth employment in sub-Saharan Africa: an assessment of
existing interventions. Paper presented to workshop in the World Bank on 7
February 2005.
Godfrey, M. (2005) Youth employment policy in developing and transition
countries- prevention as a well as a cure. Mimeo.
Haggblade, S., Hazel, P. and T. Reardon (2002) Strategies for stimulating
poverty-alleviating growth in the rural non-farm economy in developing
countries, Washington D.C., IFPRI.
IFAD (2006) Assessment of rural poverty in the Near East and North Africa,
Rome, IFAD.
IFAD (2009) Working with youth. Making a Difference in Asia and the Pacific.
Issue 29. Rome, IFAD.
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ILO (2005) Global employment trends for youth, Geneva, ILO.
ILO (2010) Global employment trends, January 2010. Geneva, ILO.
International Youth Foundation (2010) Global partnerships to promote youth
employment and employability. Baltimore, IYF.
Kehler, L. L.F. Sanabria and P. Teeple (2009) Market-driven youth programmes
and the bottom-line. Youth and Workforce Development PLP Technical Note.
USAID, SEEP Network. Washington D.C., USAID.
Mercy Corps (2009) Youth development: sector approach. Portland, Mercy Corps.
Middleton, J., A. Ziderman and A. van Adams (1993) Skills for productivity:
vocational education and training in developing countries. Washington D.C.,
World Bank.
Shenoy, M., S. Lakhey and P. Shah (2009) Creating jobs for rural youth in
Andhra Pradesh, India. Washington. D.C., World Bank.
United Nations (2007) World Youth Report. New York, United Nations.
United Nations (2009) Review of National Action Plans on Youth Employment:
putting commitment into action. Department of Economic and Social Affairs. New
York, United Nations.
World Bank (2006) 2007 World Development Report: The next generation,
Washington D.C., World Bank.
Contact:
Maria Hartl
Technical Adviser
Policy and Technical Advisory Division
E-mail: m.hartl@ifad.org
18

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