Every year, young Africans flood the job market and find that there aren’t enough jobs to go round. They are then encouraged to start their own businesses. Some do so in the agriculture sector. After all, a lot of investments have been made to market agriculture as “sexy” to young people. But this aggressive marketing ignores the very real challenges that young people face when they try their hand in agribusiness.
Those who decide to be farmers, for example, are beset with a myriad of hurdles—from production to marketing—despite the constant calls by the government for increased production. The challenges range from inability to access finance, stringent export market requirements, high incidences of pests and diseases, multiple taxes and broken market systems.
An especially big challenge is inefficient cold chain management. Farmers face the all-too-familiar fate of producing and ultimately throwing away part of their produce due to inefficient or unavailable cold chain facilities. It is common to see heaps of produce rotting in open-air markets such as Githurai in Nairobi, while within the same locale, families sleep hungry as they cannot afford food.
Then there are the enterprising and innovative young people who bravely venture into the “Wild Wild West” of value addition. Take iPop Africa, for example, a startup reclaiming the sovereignty of our local food systems by transforming underutilised, drought-tolerant and highly nutritious sorghum and millet into popular snacks. An inspired idea, by all accounts, but there has been little in the kind of institutional support needed to make this a successful business.
First, the regulatory environment makes it difficult for entrepreneurs who are just starting out to find a firm footing. To register a new business with the county government requires obtaining a fire license, food hygiene certifications, food handler permits and meeting numerous infrastructure standards required by the Kenya Bureau of Standards and the county administration. Although the counties have streamlined these licenses, they still come at a high cost.
Second, businesses need steep start up capital, including money to buy machinery and pay for labour. Trying to get financial backing from banks when you have nothing to your name is a tall order, and government facilities such as the Youth Enterprise Development Fund cannot meet the overwhelming demand.
Many young business owners are therefore forced to beg relatives and friends for capital, which is hard to come by, as many people are currently feeling the pinch of the high cost of living. Couple this with the reality of our education system, which doesn’t prepare students for entrepreneurship and it’s little wonder that most businesses do not celebrate their fifth birthday.
It is against this background that the African Food Systems Forum 2024 has been taking place in Rwanda under the theme of “Innovate, accelerate, and scale: Delivering food systems transformation in a digital and climate era”. Participants can expect lots of discussions around innovations and technology for food systems transformation in the wake of climate change in a digital era, and a showcase of the innovative agri-business projects that have managed to thrive.
However, we need to expand the scope of these discussions to speak honestly and candidly about why for every successful business displayed on the big screen at the forum, there are thousands of others that never got to start, or fell off along the way. The reality is that despite the criticality of the agri-food sector owing to the number of people it employs and those who depend on it for their livelihood, the environment has not been enabling to most entrepreneurs to thrive. Which is part of the reason why our food systems are still grappling with the challenges of food insecurity, unhealthy diets, poverty and environmental degradation.
Addressing the challenges faced by entrepreneurs in our local food systems requires a multi-sectoral approach and coordinated efforts to support coherent policies. This collaboration should aim to repurpose finances and incentives toward strengthening local food systems and small businesses. The government needs to ensure that roads are good enough for farmers to efficiently transport their produce to the market and that cold storage facilities are available in these markets to keep fruits and vegetables fresh. We need to invest in streamlined regulatory platforms and systems that make it easy for entrepreneurs to get licenses, and the cost of power needs to be affordable, even subsidised, to allow small industries to thrive.
Selling agriculture as sexy is selling half a story. We need better leadership and policies to make agriculture a viable livelihood for young people. As tech entrepreneur Ory Okolloh famously said, “We can’t entrepreneur our way around bad leadership, we can’t entrepreneur our way around bad policies”.
