WHETHER it is about purchasing local grain and other needs for refugee camps, and now increasingly being involved in recent government programmes in agriculture, the World Food Programme (WFP) like a number of United Nations agencies and some multilateral organisations, is firmly embedded with what the government is doing on a day to day basis. There are other agriculture stakeholders in the sector who are equally involved in implementing various projects like irrigation, crop experimentation, etc.

What is interesting is the manner in which WFP is taking up a project to increase youth engagement in agriculture sector, giving the matter a captivating gender bias, targeting its involvement with getting young women on board. Yet there is a distinction in relation to the programme in which WFP is actively engaged, and a more recent initiative apparently tailored more than a decade ago, that was seemingly more gender inclusive, at face value. 

'Youth in Agribusiness’ is an initiative going back to 2008 and would already have altered things for over 200,000 farmers in regions like Arusha, Dodoma, Manyara, Shinyanga, Simiyu, Singida and Tabora, which means the more recent initiative is simply a booster.

The fact that the WFP saw it fit to bring up this initiative in the now ending 31st Agriculture Expo suggests that it isn’t a lesser issue in its schedule of work. A WFP official told visitors that the decade and half initiative was meant to assist farmers engaged in strategic crops named as sunflower, sorghum and beans. 

There is a range of technical considerations why the crops were selected, but for once, nutrition and end use is part of those needs, especially to WFP as likely to be a major customer for the produce.

Definitely all issues arising in the recent initiative were noticed already in its precursor, the difference being that the former programme was geared to elevating crop tonnage and from special groups of farmers in an inclusive manner. The more recent initiative looks at youth unemployment and especially among graduates, that they have usable skills that can be improved in one way or another to blend with an agricultural vocation, Here there is some experimentation on the youths, whereas earlier experimentation was on the crops.

Still the two programmes aren’t just complementary in having involved youths in either instance, or indeed in directing considerable effort in uplifting agriculture, as there are more pertinent issues. If one makes an effort to compare the two programmes, it is clear that the earlier programme is slow but sure, that it received perhaps modest allocations either locally or generally as project funding from abroad, and yet WFP confidently talks of having brought on board upwards of 200,000 farmers.

 Even with the more noticeable resources being splashed at the moment, the WFP programme design still poses a valid question for policy makers, as to whether the target should be specific crops, or the youth, as with the latter, the range of trial and error widens dramatically, unlike pursuing crops.