Make Agriculture Attractive by Making it Pay, Youths are Interested

There has been a debate on the role of youth in agriculture and how to involve them in agriculture. However, inadequate focus has been channeled towards why majority of the youths have not adopted agriculture despite them being unemployed. This article will critically assess the current situation of agriculture in Kenya, the reasons why there is low adoption of agriculture as an occupation and career by youths and strategies that can increase engagement of youth in agriculture.

Kenya has an exceptional youthful population. According to KNBS (2019), 35.7 out of 47.6 Million people comprising of 75% of the total population is comprised of people who are below 35 years of age. The census 2019 further revels that 32.7 3 million people live in rural areas implying that Kenya have youthful rural population. With agriculture continuing to be the predominant source of employment and livelihood in Kenya by supporting approximately 80% of the population in the rural areas, the large youth population can be considered an important asset for agricultural development.

Read more ...

The Gender Quest: Empower women in Agriculture, Eradicate

The word gender describes a social construct that ascribes roles, rules (norms), responsibilities, opportunities, power, behaviour and what the society considers appropriate for men and women. Though fluid and context-specific, the construction of gender underlines the reason for the persistence of gender inequality experienced differently by men and women. Gender construction is as old as the human race, and so is gender inequality. We are all influenced by gender.

Gender norms seem to influence what is appropriate to do in our society. As a result of gender, girls and women often have lower social status, less access to resources that should naturally be given without applying the gender spectrum. These issues are at the core of the contemporary gender system, which systematically empowers one against the other, consequently producing a bidirectional relationship between gender inequality and development outcomes.

Read more ...

Drought-tolerant maize project pioneers a winning strategy for a world facing climate change

Since the 1980s, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) have spearheaded the development and deployment of climate-smart maize in Africa.

This game-changing work has generated massive impacts for smallholder farmers, maize consumers, and seed markets in the region. It also offers a blueprint for CGIAR’s new 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy, which proposes a systems transformation approach for food, land and water systems that puts climate change at the center of its mission.

Over the course of the 10-year run of the first iteration of this collaborative work on climate-adaptive maize, the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) project, CIMMYT and IITA partnered with dozens of national, regional, and private sector partners throughout sub-Saharan Africa to release around 160 affordable maize varieties. CGIAR recognizes climatesmart maize as one of the standout 50 innovations to have emerged from the institution’s first half-century of work.

Read more ...

Integrated Pest Management: Protect Yields Wisely

What Is IPM: A Concise Abbreviation for A Comprehensive Approach
IPM stands for integrated pest management that combines several tools and methods. When it comes to integrated pest management definition, we can elaborate it as certain measures to eliminate, kill or prevent pest numbers on agricultural areas with minimum harm for nature, people, and protected plants.

The term ‘pests’ relates not only to animals or insects proper but weeds and diseases as well. Their damage has a dramatically strong impact on yields, and sometimes, seedlings were destroyed completely. Pests attack plants from everywhere: rodents and nematode spoil roots in the earth, snails, and larvae destroy leaves and berries coming from the ground, and birds eat up fruit and seeds attacking from the air. The list won’t be complete without fungi, viruses, bacteria and other parasites, to mention a few.

Read more ...