Innovations Session N°27

Empowering Youth and Women in Agrifood: Bridging Entrepreneurship and Job Creation for Sustainable Impact

Africa’s agrifood systems are at a turning point. As millions of young people enter the labour market each year, and as food systems face growing pressure to become more inclusive, resilient and sustainable, the question of how youth and women participate in – and benefit from – agrifood is more urgent than ever.

Two distinct but deeply connected pathways define this participation: entrepreneurship and employment. Some young people and women will build their own enterprises as processors, traders, service providers, digital innovators or agri-entrepreneurs across local value chains. Others will seek and access decent jobs within those same value chains as skilled workers, technicians, managers or cooperative members. Both pathways matter, need to be supported, and they reinforce each other. More viable youth – and women – led enterprises create more decent jobs and a stronger pool of skilled workers strengthens the enterprises that employ them.

Globally, 44% of working youth were employed in agrifood systems in 2021 but employment too often means informal, low-paid or precarious work rather than jobs with stability and growth prospects.[1] At the same time, many youth – and women – led enterprises remain trapped at small scale, unable to grow, formalise or create employment for others. Women and young women face the sharpest constraints: concentrated in the least visible and least rewarded segments of value chains, and facing persistent barriers linked to land, finance, skills, mobility, social norms and exclusion from leadership and decision-making.[2]

The 27th PAFO–COLEAD Innovations Session takes both pathways in consideration. It asks how agrifood systems and the organisations, cooperatives, MSMEs and support ecosystems within them can better serve youth and women as both entrepreneurs and jobseekers, and how strengthening one pathway can reinforce the other for sustainable, inclusive impact.

[1] FAO,2025, The Status of Youth in Agrifood Systems

[2] FAO, 2024, The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems; ILO, 2024, Global Employment Trends for Youth