RE: Youth in agriculture: what lessons can we draw from evaluations? | Eval Forward

Dear all who have engaged with this discussion,

It is good to see the level of passion for the inclusion of young people in agriculture and I have been following each point with interest. But if I may probe a little deeper, I think Lal is getting closest to the point that I  have been making.

The lessons learned in evaluations regarding young people in agriculture are valid, important and at least in my experience continually reinvented with each evaluation including the very good synthesis carried out by IFAD of over ten years of projects. Yet, where do these lessons go? 

Do we actually see a shift in the way young people are included in agriculture? I agree that we cannot classify all youth as the same and there are, in every country, young people who are naturally drawn to working on the land and are passionate and skilled.  These are valuable and inherent in any agriculture community.

Yet, rural communities tend to be shrinking as the other young people leave for other opportunities. Many will not find those opportunity and end up unemployed in cities.  If we are serious about the SDGs, particularly 2, 8 and 11, can all these learnings, from all these evaluations not be scaled up to make a re-investment of youth in agriculture.  The above mentioned synthesis of IFAD makes this point.  It says it is now time to scale up efforts based on ten years of learning.

So my real question is .... are evaluations making a difference or not? If not, how does that happen to greater effect?

 

Kind regards 

Dorothy Lucks