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Opinion: Africa’s Agricultural Revolution Will Be More Silicon Valley Than Rift Valley

Opinion: Africa’s Agricultural Revolution Will Be More Silicon Valley Than Rift Valley

By Esther Ngumbi | From Food Tank

The African Development Bank, Africa’s biggest lending institution, recently elected a new leader: Akinwumi Adesina. The former Minister of Agriculture in Nigeria, Adesina led an agricultural transformation in his country.  Among Adesina’s revolutionary acts was the launch of a program to develop 750,000 young entrepreneurs—Nagropreneurs—in agriculture. In his new position, Adesina will have the opportunity to promote similar reforms across Africa. It is just what Africa needs.

Africa has the world’s largest proportion of young people, as well as the highest prevalence of hunger in the world. The majority live in rural areas, and their families are farmers who largely remain outside the mainstream of the formal economy, struggling to increase their productivity and incomes.

Today, 70 percent of Africa’s young people live on less than US$2 a day and the youth unemployment is high. African countries face the challenge of providing employment to the young, even as its working age population is expected to double to one billion over the next 25 years. Agricultural development offers a crucial part of the solution to this dilemma.

For sustainable economic growth to become a defining reality across the region, this young generation must be empowered to transform agriculture from a poverty trap to a high-technology powerhouse of innovation in sustainable development.

Africa’s agricultural revolution will be digitized and monetized. Its leaders will make millions. Its rank and file will have college degrees, sport wearable technology, operate high-tech tractors and drones, read soil maps, interpret weather data, and access futures markets. Africa has the potential to produce abundant, safe and healthy food that will not only meet the continent’s food needs, but also be of such taste, class and distinction that the whole world will want it.

But to get there, Africa’s youth need to lead. And, today, our younger generation wants nothing to do with agriculture, because it is tedious. They see it as a dead-end.

I can relate to this mindset. Growing up in a rural farm in the Kenyan Coast, we had to grow everything that we ate. I did not enjoy the process of farming, and never ever did I want to be a farmer. Instead, I wanted to be a banker. I envied the accountants seated in air-conditioned offices. I, too, wanted a career that would make me look—and feel—cool.

Young people possess the energy and creativity needed to transform agriculture. They are tech-savvy, purpose-driven and entrepreneurial. Africa should inspire our younger generation so that they see agriculture as a sector of opportunity that will not only provide jobs and wealth for young agri-preneurs, but also good food for Africa’s increasing population.

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