Kigali, Rwanda 29–31 October 2025
At the 2025 CAADP Partnership Platform (PP) held in Kigali on 30 October, the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) co-convened, alongside AGRA through its Youth in Employment from Food and Agriculture (YEFFA) programme, a high-impact side event titled “Unlocking the Power of Youth Agripreneurs: Policy Mentorship and Innovation for Africa’s Agrifood Transformation.”
The session reflected the spirit of FANRPAN’s new Strategy (2025–2035), which places youth empowerment, innovation, and inclusive policy engagement at the heart of Africa’s food systems transformation. It brought together a diverse group of participants from government, private sector, youth enterprises, and development partners, including representatives from the Mastercard Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation.
Photo: Putting strategy into action—FANRPAN and youth innovators at CAADP PP 2025.
The dialogue featured a dynamic panel of young agripreneurs and ecosystem builders from Rwanda and Zambia, who shared practical insights on adoption, finance that fits, and mentorship-to-market pathways. They highlighted the need to design interventions around farmers’ real pain points rather than technology trends, and to embed youth-led ventures in functional value chains with bundled support—technology, market access, finance, and skills development.
Participants engaged in vibrant discussions on how to translate continental and national youth commitments into operational mechanisms, including youth representation in programme governance, innovation sandboxes for responsible scaling, and blended finance instruments to de-risk early-stage ventures while crowding in private investment.
Speaking on behalf of FANRPAN, Mr. Suwilanji Sinyangwe underscored the Network’s conviction that youth must be positioned as central actors in policy and investment frameworks:
Let’s stop calling youth ‘cross-cutting.’ Cross-cutting is what we say when we’ll do a little bit everywhere and not enough anywhere. Youth must be a main theme—a headline pillar—with clear goals, seats at the table, and resources behind it. When we build programmes around youth as co-designers and market actors, we move from pilots to scale.
Adding a perspective from the field, Mr. Chikondi Mbewe, a Zambian agripreneur and alumnus of the YEFFA-FANRPAN Mentorship Programme, shared:
Let’s stop calling youth ‘cross-cutting.’ Cross-cutting is what we say when we’ll do a little bit everywhere and not enough anywhere. Youth must be a main theme—a headline pillar—with clear goals, seats at the table, and resources behind it. When we build programmes around youth as co-designers and market actors, we move from pilots to scale.
The session reinforced a key message from FANRPAN’s strategy—scaling youth impact requires structured policy pathways, not fragmented projects. Participants called for innovation sandboxes linked to off-takers as near-term mechanisms to test, learn, and scale, and emphasized the enabling conditions for durable, investable youth-led growth: digital inclusion, accessible collateral systems, and genuine co-creation in programme design and monitoring.
Through this collaboration, FANRPAN continues to champion youth-driven transformation by linking policy evidence, mentorship, and market systems, advancing its strategic vision to build resilient, inclusive, and competitive agrifood systems across Africa.
