Empowering urban youth for accelerating urban greening and urban agri-food systems transformation and promoting green job opportunities at city level
- Background and Rationale
Zambia’s agrifood sector presents significant opportunities for youth employment, entrepreneurship, and innovation across the value chain — from production and aggregation to processing, logistics, digital services, and climate-smart solutions. Despite this potential, young agripreneurs face persistent barriers including limited access to finance, inadequate business skills, low adoption of digital tools, weak market linkages, climate-related shocks, and insufficient exposure to peer networks and mentors.
Under the FAO-supported initiatives, including ICA-4 interventions in youth-led cooperatives and agribusinesses, it has become increasingly clear that young agripreneurs require structured, ongoing platforms for collaboration, learning, and capacity strengthening. Existing efforts are often fragmented, short-term, and not designed for sustained interaction.
To address this gap, the Youth Agrifood Business Community of Practice (YAB-CoP) is proposed as a catalytic learning and innovation ecosystem for young Zambian agrifood entrepreneurs. The CoP will create an enabling environment for knowledge sharing, peer support, capacity building, market engagement, and collective problem-solving.
2. Purpose of the Community of Practice
The purpose of YAB-CoP is to strengthen youth participation, competitiveness, and resilience within Zambia’s agrifood value chains by fostering collaborative learning, innovation, and business development support.
Specifically, the CoP seeks to:
- Build a strong and active network of youth-led agrifood businesses.
- Facilitate continuous learning and adoption of best practices in agribusiness management, climate-smart agriculture, and value addition.
- Enhance youth capacity to access finance, technology, and markets.
- Promote youth-driven innovation and digital transformation in the agrifood ecosystem.
- Strengthen the governance and performance of youth-led cooperatives.
- Enable youth voices to contribute to policy dialogues and sector reforms.
3. Objectives
Overall Objective
To establish and operationalize a sustainable Community of Practice that empowers youth-led agrifood enterprises to grow, innovate, and contribute to Zambia’s food systems transformation.
Specific Objectives
- Facilitate coordinated learning and knowledge exchange among youth agripreneurs.
- Strengthen technical and business management skills through targeted learning labs, coaching, and practical demonstrations.
- Support market linkage initiatives, buyer-seller networking, and input/output access pathways.
- Promote climate-smart, nutrition-sensitive, and circular agrifood business models.
- Foster youth-led innovation by creating opportunities for showcase, competitions, and digital tool adoption.
- Establish a structured platform for multi-stakeholder collaboration including government, private sector, and development partners.
