#YouthInAg

In spite of what the title might suggest, we’re not going to tell you the story of a Walt Disney princess who found the prince of her dreams. Our heroine is Merab, a sweet and charismatic young woman from Uganda. Our featured adventure is her Generation Food journey and her metamorphosis into a successful businesswoman, and beyond. Let’s start from the beginning.

Deo runs Eastern Coffee, a coffee-roasting company in Mbale, Uganda. He is involved in Rikolto's Generation Food programme in Uganda. Learn about the values that guide him as a young agrifood entrepreneur, something he is eager to share with other young people on the same path.

Hope Dina is about to launch her own organic pesticide and fertiliser. The Generation Food programme in Uganda gave her a push to make her business idea come true. She hopes her story inspires government and private companies to create an environment that supports young entrepreneurs to flourish.

Deo runs Eastern Coffee, a coffee-roasting company in Mbale, Uganda. He is involved in Rikolto's Generation Food programme in Uganda. Learn about the values that guide him as a young agrifood entrepreneur, something he is eager to share with other young people on the same path.

In this podcast episode, Jelle talks with our colleague Robinson Nakwasa from Rikolto in Uganda and with Piloya Innocent. She is one of the promising entrepreneurs shaping the future of Uganda's food economy through the Generation Food-project.

Bui Thi Ngoc Duyen, a young woman, has successfully been applying the knowledge and skills she gained during a training course in her agricultural business. Her dream: becoming a safe agricultural product distributor.

Awa watched her son leave 7 years ago from Burkina Faso to pursue better economic opportunities. When the 28-year-old Adama was forced to return, he found that members of the farmers' cooperative of his community were calling on him to join. What opportunities did mother and son find in collaborating for a more professional farmers' organisation?

Besides trying to keep up with fast-paced population growth, cities in Africa have been facing several other crises, such as pandemics, climate change and war. Amidst these challenges are also opportunities on the road to recovery of local food systems.This is the reason why for this #AfricanCITYFOODmonth campaign, Rikolto has decided to put innovation and multi-stakeholder collaborations as game-changers to strengthen resilience within cities’ food systems.

This school year we experimented with offering smoothies and soup at several secondary schools in Antwerp. The smoothies and soup made of vegetable and fruit surpluses. This is done through a wonderful cooperation with Foodsavers of the city of Antwerp, delivered to the school gate! The fact that they are made from food surpluses is the reason for a very accessible price. All of this is part of the Get Wasted project.

Five years ago, we introduced you to Freddy Mairena, a Nicaraguan cocoa farmer. Freddy’s honest and friendly smile can be found today in the promotional images of the Boni "Nicaragua" chocolate in the Colruyt Group retail shops in Belgium. Here is Freddy’s story now: from producer to entrepreneur.

In this project, Rikolto sought to attract the young generation's interest in agriculture through digital-based farming and agripreneurship. 

Sub-Saharan Africa has a concentration of 60% - the largest proportion - of potential young entrepreneurs in the world. However, young entrepreneurs are facing numerous constraints. What's more, they are being expected to come up with “Eat the World” ideas, when most of them became entrepreneurs out of a strong economic necessity.

Nayeli, 21 years old cocoa farmer dreamt of participating in one of the training courses on cocoa production under agroforestry systems, organised every year at the CURLA university in Honduras. She was over the moon when she found out last year that she could participate. In the course, she learned about so much more than good crop management. Find out how Rikolto and Colruyt Group through the Collibri Foundation became part of her dream.

According to the FAO, 55 percent of the improvement in food security achieved in developing countries over the past decades is thanks to programmes that empower women. In our Generation Food programme in Ouagadougou, we explicitly encourage young female entrepeneurs to join the workshops and incubators. Bénédicte Marie Reine Kinda (27) is one of them.

Ten months after the launch of the Generation Food project in Ouagadougou, young entrepreneurs are working to make their brands well-known agri-food companies. Benewinde Rodrigue Anicet Ouigba, 32, is one of these young people.

Jimson runs the Kaizari farm, which is located at the foot of Mount Kijenge on the outskirts of Arusha. He is the third generation to continue this family business and he currently has a small herd of six dairy cows and three calves. On his farm he produces high quality local dairy products.

On the 21st of November, one month after the YOUCA action day, Rikolto and Youca launched a new collaboration to support and encourage a new Generation of young food entrepreneurs to drive change towards a more sustainable and just food system.

On 28 and 29 September 2021, the second edition of the Generation Food Makeathon took place. For two days, a multidisciplinary group of students worked on prototypes of food products based on food waste. The winning group came up with a product that was as tasty as it was surprising.

Youth is a driving force that could lead the agricultural transformation in Ghana’s cocoa farming communities and contribute to the reduction of unemployment in Tanzania. Our #YouthinAg ambassadors Yvonne and Hilda hosted a café session during the #ANDE Annual Conference sharing their insights of working with young farmers and entrepreneurs buzzing with fresh and innovative ideas. Time has come for young people to sit in the driver’s seat.

When Madeleine Delma, a 25-year-old agronomy student from Ouagadougou, spotted the Generation Food: Call for Young Entrepreneurs in Agribusiness online, she did not hesitate to apply. “I have always been fascinated by food processing.” She wanted to create a tomato sauce.

In a context of economic instability and climate change, improving agricultural competitiveness is the responsibility of more than 2,439,162 rural young people in Peru. In the last 4 years, Rikolto, in collaboration with partners, has generated a cycle of annual forums with 182 young producer leaders participating. Read the reflections of our colleague Lith Montes, coordinator of projects with young people in the coffee sector.

In Rancho Grande, Nicaragua, we look at the cup of coffee with a positive environmental, economic, and social impact for the families of coffee producers thanks to the win-win relationship promoted by Rikolto and the company Exportadora Atlantic S. A. (Expasa).

Meet Rikolto's #YouthinAg experts: some of them are young in age, others young of mind, and all of them with a passion to invest in the untapped potential of young farmers and entrepreneurs.

Karina Lopez grew up as the daughter of coffee farmers in Ibarra, Ecuador. Like many young people in her region, she didn't see much future in agriculture or the product her family grows. Meet her story and how she´s making the world a better place with coffee.

Bartolomé and other young indigenous Panamanians from the region Ngäbe-Buglé have taken up cocoa cultivation with their families using agroforestry systems (SAF) to protect the environment in their community in the face of increasing extensive cattle ranching. Read more about their story.

In this episode of the Rikolto podcast, Thibault, Victor, Hilda, and Chris join us from Leuven (Belgium) and Arusha (Tanzania) and tell us all about how young entrepreneurs are changing food systems.

In collaboration with the Women’s Initiative for Start-ups and Entrepreneurship (WISE) in Vietnam, Rikolto assembled more than 100 stakeholders from the food supply chain in Hanoi to exchange opportunities and challenges and address solutions towards building sustainable urban food systems. Discover more here!

Tenacity and resilience are words that describe Yamileth Torrez. At the age of 27, she is a survivor of Covid-19, the shocks of two hurricanes and losses to her income from cocoa production due to the effects of climate variability.

Four years ago, captivated by the flavours of cocoa and chocolate, members of the Youth Committee of the Peruvian farmer organisation Pangoa wanted to specialise in those areas. Today they can be recognised as tasters of cocoa paste and liquor. What impact did the certification have on the young people's professional lives, and what "quality" footprint does the new professionals leave in cooperatives like Pangoa? Find out more in this article.

On Wednesday, June 16th, 40 young people from all over the world met to talk about The True Cost Of Food during the dialogue organised by FoodUnfolded and Rikolto. Aäron De Fruyt, a former colleague, participated and shared his impressions in this blog.

Lith Montés has been with Rikolto for 4 years as national coordinator of coffee projects in Peru. She often reminds us "I work so that young people have opportunities that I fortunately had".

60 young women and men joined us to hack the challenge of how to feed the greater Ouaga area, debating and defining opportunities and challenges for young food entrepreneurs, from 20 to 21 May. Read more about their journey.

Rikolto and FoodUnfolded, a platform powered by EIT Food are organising the dialogue: The true cost of food - Access to Healthy & Sustainable Diets for Everyone, as part of the United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021, on Wednesday 16 June.

The Mitiiri cooperative is an organisation led by a team of young, dynamic agricultural producers committed to professionalising their organisation, so that it can position itself as a reliable business partner with a good reputation in the Centre-East region of Burkina Faso.

In Pedro Moncayo, a town located 60 kilometres north of Quito, the capital of Ecuador, Rikolto identified a group of farmers willing to modernise their business to increase their incomes, not only respecting the limits of nature but also honouring them.

Bad infrastructure and roads, a continuous threat of armed conflict, and high and arbitrary taxes make it difficult to get the coffee across the border and obtain a fair price for it. Wannes Slosse, a Belgian PhD-student at the University of Ghent, is examining Rikolto-supported coffee cooperatives in the highlands of the Eastern provinces of the DR of Congo.

What happens when you bring together a group of students from different courses under the guidance of experienced coaches to tackle a social problem? You get great ideas. And one of those ideas is about to hit the shelves: Délicé, a granola made from the surplus from processing cranberries.

Jessica is a cocoa producer, mother and community leader. She has been promoting generational change in the farmers' organisation Fortaleza del Valle for a few years now, as well as the improvement of cocoa plantations. How does Jessica see the future of the organisation with more women leaders like her? Read her vision in this story.

Mambasa, DR Congo has an enormously rich biodiversity. But poaching and massive deforestation for agriculture threaten the region. The young farmers of Cacao Okapi opt for a radically different approach. You can taste that approach in a Belgian-Congolese gourmet chocolate from Veliche: Okapi 65.

We were supposed to interview two young farmer members of the cooperative in April 2020 with a camera crew. Unfortunately, not one but two crises postponed our visit with Rikolto: first the Covid-19 crisis, and in November, two severe hurricanes that caused irreparable damage in Central America. We arrived on Yamileth and Santiago's land nine months later. This is their story of resilience.

At Rikolto, the question ‘What will we eat tomorrow?’ is at the core of our work. One specific aspect of this question is ‘Are we still going to have farmers, not only in terms of the workforce but also people who have sufficient knowledge of both agriculture and technology and who are skilled in transferring this knowledge to future generations?'

The seed of the Sur-Siendo Cooperative was planted by several people, among them a 28-year-old young man, Diego Viturco. Learn about its history and how it has been contributing to hundreds of families having a healthy and economically accessible food alternative in southern Quito.

Meet the Generation Food entrepreneurs: They are young, ambitious and the driving force behind food system change. On 27-28 August, they took part in the Generation Food Hackathon in Arusha to develop their business ideas.

Jorge Flores, coordinator of youth projects in Nicaragua, shares his personal experience on how you can empower other young people while working on your own empowerment.

Generation Food was launched on Wednesday 25 September. The result of a collaboration between the province of Flemish Brabant, Boerenbond, PROEF, EIT Food, KU Leuven, UCLL, KBC, City of Leuven and Rikolto. The partnership wants to combine their expertise and network in this way to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship.

Indonesian farmers are ageing. How can we save the country's agrarian industry and food security? This is not just a question to ponder, but to act upon. Millennials on the Move encapsulates our strategies, activities, progress, lessons and achievement on how we work to rejuvenate the ageing agriculture sector.

Rikolto hosts 40 young people from the Uganda, Kenya, DRC, Tanzania and Rwanda in a workshop to learn more about food systems in East Africa and how to make them more sustainable. The workshop is organised in collaboration with Young Professional for Agricultural Development (YPARD), and is supported by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

YPARD in collaboration with FAO and Rikolto will organise an interactive workshop where young farmers can interact, learn and share best practices, with a focus on strengthening rural and urban linkages for sustainable food and agriculture.

How do you unlock the – often hidden – potential of rural and urban youth? In three workshops, young people from Peru, Tanzania and Indonesia were challenged to dream about their future food system. Read more about the methodology that was used and the insights of the workshop leaders.

A glimpse into the future of the current food system shows massive challenges ahead for the 7.6 billion people currently inhabiting the planet. Based on that concern, Rikolto is picking up its pace in securing food for the future through the involvement of consumers, especially young people. Why young people?

Starting an eco-tourism project? Selling innovative products like soap and cream made from cocoa? What are the opportunities for rural youth to tackle high unemployment rates? Six young Nicaraguan cocoa producers got inspired during an exchange trip in Honduras, to be able to set up their own start-ups in their home communities.

Young people will inherit one of the greatest challenges that we have all started to struggle with even today: how to feed a rapidly growing world population. VECO Indonesia and VECO Belgium teamed up to visit a high school in Bali, SMAN 4, to speak with the students and learn more about what they envision as food for the future. Read this article and watch a short video to find out what these young people think about the challenges in Indonesia.

Our farmers are growing old. And truth is, they produce about 80% of our food. 90% of the farms worldwide are run by individual farmers or families, but nowadays it´s difficult to spot a youngster in the field. So, how can farming still be attractive for youngsters?

"Let's Become Farmers" was the motto at this talk show that started with a documentary called "Agriyoungsters" made by Joren De Neve, an intern at VECO Indonesia and a student in Social Work from the University of Ghent, Belgium. the movie gave an insight on the life of a young farmer in Boyolali, Kiswoyo, who went to Jakarta after he graduated high school, only to come back to his village a few years later and discover that agriculture is an industry which provides him with not only an income but also a purpose and a future.

Two Belgian organizations are boosting Nicaragua's cocoa sector through the project "Yes, Youth Can", sponsored by Rikolto and Youca (Zuiddag), which also involved the cooperative La Campesina. It is expected to reach 300 young people in the municipalities of Matiguás and Río Blanco of Nicaragua in three years, including 120 young women.

VECO teamed up with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Zambia to develop a common signification framework to grasp attitudes, perspectives and emergent patterns on youth involvement in the agri-business sector. Following the design of this framework, a first data collection took place in Peru, Ecuador and Nicaragua in December 2015.