Nairobi - President Uhuru Kenyatta on Wednesday encouraged African youth to venture into farming as a career and earn income, as well as grow the continent’s economy.
Kenyatta said that the involvement of youth in the agriculture sector would give it the necessary impetus to achieve development.
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“Agriculture, as it stands, is an aged sector and requires fresh blood to be injected. We cannot achieve Vision 2030 without the full participation of the younger generation,” said Kenyatta in a press statement released by the Presidential Press Service Unit.
Kenyatta made the remarks as a panellist during the World Economic Forum talks in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.
The panel included Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn and Tanzanian Vice-President Samia Suluhu, President of African Development Bank (AfDB) Akinwumi Adesina and Deputy Chairperson of African Union, Erastus Mwencha.
Commenting on the government of Kenya, Kenyatta said that the government had put in place the necessary regulatory and policy frameworks to harness the potential in agriculture to transform the country.
Kenyatta said the government was also fixing regulations and processes that denied the farmer the ability to benefit from value-addition of their products.
He cited coffee farming, where regulation and processes meant that a farmer “who grows the product does not even know what he will get and just sits back and waits... this is a huge disincentive”.
Kenyatta said his government was working on value-addition in upgrading infrastructure to enable farmers to access the market and working on policies to de-risk agriculture.
Kenyatta highlighted the various steps the government was taking to ensure attainment of the country’s development blueprint, Vision 2030, which was a national long-term development policy that aims to transform Kenya into a middle-income economy.
The Vision comprises of three key pillars: Economic, Social and Political that aims at achieving an average economic growth rate of 10 percent per annum and sustaining the same until 2030.
The African leaders discussed the progress and priorities in promoting agriculture as a growth sector in food security, job creation and reliable incomes to rural populations.
“We, in Kenya, are ensuring better management of diminishing water resources to avail enough water for irrigation as we shift from rain-fed agriculture,” said Kenyatta, adding that his government was also scaling up issuance of title deeds for the citizens, as well as enabling women to own land as major stakeholders in the country’s agricultural sector.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam emphasised the need for governments to “own” the agriculture sector in order to have positive impacts with partnerships with donors, private sector and civil society groups.
Tanzania’s Vice-President Samia Suluhu explained the “Kilimo Kwanza” concept, a homegrown idea that entails mobilisation of the active participation of all Tanzanians, development partners and the private sector to enhance the agricultural economy.
AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina said for the agriculture sector to achieve the desired results, there was need for a paradigm shift in how agriculture was viewed. He said the African continent spent $35 billion on food imports.
ANA