BY EBELE ORAKPO

The unemployment situation in Nigeria and Africa as a whole, is on the rise and the agricultural sector, it is believed, holds the key to mass employment and poverty reduction while at the same time, making food available to millions of poor and hungry people.

Jelena Zivkovic…Nigeria needs a self-sustaining youth agriculture entrepreneurship training centre

To this end, the Rockefeller Foundation led a Challenge Competition based on key global problems identified at the 2011 Innovation Forum. One of the challenges, called ‘Farm Now,’ aims to encourage unemployed youth to enter the agricultural industry to help revitalize the sector and generate greater employment opportunities for the poor.

Convinced that Nigeria could benefit from this, Fatimah Adama, then student of the American University of Nigeria (AUN), entered the competition working together with AUN’s Interim Director, Academic Advising & Retention Unit, Ms. Jelena Zivkovic. They carried out a research on how to get young Nigerians interested in agriculture. Zivkovic spoke to Vanguard Learning in Yola. Excerpts:

Research:
The research stemmed from one of my students, Fatimah Adama who graduated in 2011. She entered a competition by the Rockefeller Foundation. Our interest was in social entrepreneurship modeled after Martin Burt and what he is doing in Paraguay. So she became a finalist with Rockefeller Foundation and that was how I got involved. We put a proposal together seeking funding. We were awarded funds to conduct our research.

The research topic was in the area of youth agriculture as a social enterprise for Nigeria. We were primarily interested in understanding the attitudes, perceptions and interests of young people in agriculture. So we went around the country, distributed over 1,000 questionnaires and  got back 1,000 where the participants established that youths in Nigeria are eager to secure employment, but they need to be assured that agriculture can be a better means of earning money.

We did focus groups and interviews with young people, policymakers, farmers, different interest groups; again, to gauge the interests, perceptions and attitudes of young people towards agriculture.

Self sustaining centre:
From the social enterprise perspective, we wanted to model our idea after what was happening in Paraguay and in Songhai Centre in the Republic of Benin. What is really special about the San Francisco School for Rural Entrepreneurs, a rural secondary school in Paraguay and Songhai Centre, is that they run a training facility that is self-sustainable which is really amazing. So there is no waste because everything gets turned back into something good.

We wanted to go see how they do it, to meet with the trainees, to see what they get out of it because we wanted to know if we could do something like that in Nigeria. So we had one year to do our research and to use up all the funds. Basically, we have found that young people will always be interested in having a training centre that specializes in different aspects of agriculture because they are tired of sitting around doing nothing and they do want to do something.

Earn-while-you-learn:
But what makes our training centre unique is that we will introduce this concept of earn-while-you-learn. So while the trainees are with us, they would actually earn, so they would learn poultry – how to take care of chicken, how to brand and market it and whatever money they could generate will be brought back to the school and the student will be given an allowance. We really want them to have a hands-on experience not just coming to get all the theory part but the whole cycle – from breeding, to packaging, to branding etc., so obviously, there was really interest in that. That was a kind of highlight for Fatima and I. We finished that in 2013 and made our final submission.

So now, we are at the point of sourcing funds. We were encouraged by the results we got, having a self-sustaining youth agriculture entrepreneurship training centre would be something that the country and the young people need. Operating a self-sustaining training centre will ensure a sustainable revenue stream while also creating a real-life, holistic training environment for participants; that is, one in which participants can engage in applied learning situations. Empowering youth and stimulating the agriculture sector may help alleviate poverty and create a lifelong-learning generation.

Site:
The school will be sited in Abuja. We have actually located a farm so we are already in partnership with the owner of the farm. Because he has already set it up, it will be much easier for us, we will just have to get a training centre. The thing about the training centre is that it is very capital-intensive so I am starting now to kind of shift not my interest but the urgency. Setting up an agricultural centre is wonderful, but because of the capital needed, it is kind of very slow.

We are also looking at using the self-sustaining principle in service industry which will require less capital. So although I have not done much research but I am kind of looking at setting it up for electricians, carpenters and beauty salons using the same principle because they don’t require as much capital.

Government involvement:
When we went to Songhai Centre, we noticed quite a few representatives, actually from Nigeria who were there to see what they were doing. There were a few governors and they wanted to establish the same in their states so we definitely need state and federal support.

Overall outcome:
The overall outcome that we expect to achieve in this project is to encourage and engage youth in pursuing agriculture as a meaningful and viable career option. The environment of engagement will emphasize experiential learning, which takes the form of relevant hands-on experience. Entrepreneurial skills will give participants real-life simulations and applications to the agriculture sector.