Proceedings discussion No

Ngaleu Yves Stephane, Enjeal Nys Agro, Cameroon

Major Achievement and success stories.

I am Yves Stephane NGALEU, from Cameroon and I work with the Cameroon government under the ministry of agriculture and rural development as agriculture chief of post, Extension worker and agriculture advisory service actor in a rural community call NKOLNTSA, based at SA’A, LEKIE, CENTER Region - Cameroon

I am a member of civil society Organisations where I work actively as volunteer to participate in the achievement of the United Nation Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). From these organisations I have achieved exceptional skills on social entrepreneurship, fundraising, etc. that permit me to work more than just a civil servant.

I would like to search my experience when I was just nominated agriculture chief of post and I was working under my sub divisional delegate who have little knowledge on social entrepreneurship, fundraising and on the SDG.

I was nominated to a post having more than 20 big villages with about 22 000 population with 6600 farmers (the largest post of the sub-division) in a rural area with little or no mobile network, thus no internet connection. The only budget that was allocated to me was for transport, no communication, no office materiel etc. the agri-post is not built so there no office. The local population of that community are fully in agriculture but they don’t consider the government agent in the field due to the fact that they were abandoned and neglected by the other chief of post. Their major needs are capacity building, farms equipment, available market and finance

The challenges I had, was to motivate the local population, build their capacity and ameliorate sustainably their farm productivity.

The beginning was not easy because there no office. I had to put in place a strategy that will permit me to touch effectively almost all the villages. I put in place a time table by village, I targeted active and non-active farms group that I started working with them. It was not easy to have most of the members during the working sessions. I then decided to innovated and organise an agriculture seminar.

To best organise this seminar I needed support from partners, from my hierarchy and the mayor. The potential partners were base in the Capital city which is about 72km² from the village, I needed communication network to raise awareness on the event I started by allocating to the capital city where I am still living up to date, I created a blog (my first blog). With some of the local population we identify the main objective of the seminar, which were presented to my hierarchy and rejected by them due to the fact that they have little or no knowledge on social entrepreneurship and fund raising, and they said there is no budget for such a seminar at their level and that I don’t have the necessary capacity to organise such an event. I then put in place an organisation group made up of the local population to carry out the project, their capacity where being reinforce on leadership, management, on event planning and follow up. We identified and contacted some partners. Some of them respond positively by providing farms equipment and input for farmer and educative material for the event. Those who contacted my hierarchy where discouraged and didn’t support us. In other to raise funds for feeding and refreshment, farmers propose a registration fee. I put two month of my salary on to support the organisation of the event.

At the end of the event, we had about 100 farmers impacted, learning materials, pesticides and farm equipment distributed to farmers.

Due to this seminar, farmers now considering me, all villages even those who did take part at the event are asking for a second edition, I now count 2 new farmers organisations, recently on June 2018, one of the groups received a donation from the regional delegate of agriculture.

Here is the link of the report https://enjealnysagro.wordpress.com/2017/12/11/rapport-du-seminaire-du-poste-agricole-de-saa/

This is the link for blog https://enjealnysagro.wordpress.com/

Alfred Adjabeng, Reach Out to Future Leaders Movement, Ghana

Most of the times, I hear people say 'make agriculture sexy'. After working with rural young people, mostly rural young farmers, I have realised that in order to encourage more young people into agriculture we need to introduce them to sustainable agriculture tools, smart technologies, connect their farms to urban market. 

Modern agriculture sustainable technology makes agriculture sexy! 

Aklilu Nigussie, Ethiopian Institutes of Agricultural Research, Ethiopia

To the question raised by Dr. Justin Chisenga (See comment 34)

Do you have youth role models in agriculture in your countries?

Yes there are but very few in number and their success of degree constrained for different homogeneous and heterogeneous factors that determine the accelerative of achievement to optimum level.

Who are they?

They are public extension or scaling out of technology users [like crop varieties-food crop and cash crop (vegetables and fruit), poultry technologies user-(layer, broilers and dual purpose birds)] in the agro-pastoral communities and mid and highland agro-ecological zones of the country.

What have they done to serve as role models to other youths who want to engage in agriculture?

There is an experience sharing type of technological scaling out system that are implemented as a model system in Ethiopian Institutes of Agricultural Research which is known as organizing farm level field day with different stakeholders participation; with this day they will share all the SWOT of technologies implemented with for food security, income generation, and livelihood. Yet; the system needs other triangulated innovative modalities to encompass many different youth.

If yes, would you say they are doing well in their work?

I could say that with few degree of reservation as there are best ways of making them so productive and efficient with different innovative modalities of agricultural technologies use.