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The Road to the Young Africa Works Summit

The Young Africa Works Summit aims to bring together a community dedicated to finding solutions to youth unemployment in Africa. One of our primary goals for the Summit is to engage young people, ensuring their voices, perspectives and ideas are heard. As part of this, we will be sharing a series of blogs written by young leaders working in the agricultural sector in Africa.


Pinpointing the beginning of my journey as a social entrepreneur is a difficult task. Many of my initiatives were reactions to situations I thought could be improved, or attempts to apply my creative energy to benefit others and myself.

As a freshman, I learned about the existence of Engineering Projects in Community Service at Arizona State University, a platform that challenges engineering students to develop technical solutions to problems with a social impact. My participation in this program led me on a path in social entrepreneurship that I have stayed on ever since. On this path, I founded Stair Gardens Project (SGP), earned numerous awards for my efforts, won the Social Venture Challenge at Clinton Global Initiative University in 2015, became a Resolution Project Fellow, and, most importantly, I am making a positive impact in agricultural productivity in my community in rural Zimbabwe.

The Stair Gardens Project (SGP) is a tiered gardening system that was designed to empower small scale farmers to increase their food production and create employment opportunities. During its pilot phase in the summer of 2015, SGP evolved into Solar Water Solutions – an initiative with similar goals but a different approach. The pilot venture aims to increase productivity in subsistence agriculture by increasing the water supply and harnessing solar energy to power groundwater pumps on boreholes.

My interest in agriculture stems from my upbringing in Zimbabwe. Agriculture is a long-standing practice in my country, and most families own a small plot of land where they grow some crops every year. My family is no exception. Growing up, the rainy season was a time of hard work characterized by long hours of planting, cultivating and nurturing crops. Consequently, my experience in agriculture ranges from handling a cattle-drawn plough to till the land to hand-harvesting maize, and more recently, writing a business profile for a commercial farm in Ngezi. Farming for my family, and many other families in Zimbabwe, is very labour intensive and often unprofitable. Given Zimbabwe’s high unemployment rates, the many untapped opportunities for growth in agriculture are a source of hope.

Young people are the owners of the future – a future that can be bright if we also own the means of production today, principally in agro-based economies in Africa. Our role is to be innovators and adopters of the agricultural technology that can launch the continent onto a trajectory of economic prosperity. There is an obvious misconception and stigma that accompanies careers in agriculture, particularly in this age when entertainment and technology provide seemingly lucrative alternatives. Popular opinion tends to suggest that involvement in agriculture entails wearing a pair of overalls and pulling out weeds on a farm somewhere. Africa urgently needs to initiate a shift of opinion. Young people should become the game-changers who remodel this economic backbone of Africa by applying their talents in engineering, economics, business and management to transform agro-based initiatives into profitable enterprises.We must create solutions to evenly distribute food to end hunger and poverty. Youth cannot do this on their own. Governments across Africa are required to integrate young people into economy-building efforts in the agricultural sector, as well as in other sectors.

As a young person who has experienced education in different world systems, I think my most important life lesson is to learn to be a learner. My accomplishments are collections of all the things I have taken time to learn. For my generation, learning is now possible with greater ease. Today, I can learn from anyone, at any time, and virtually attend influential conferences from my computer screen. It is because of my insatiable appetite to learn that I highly anticipate attending the Young Africa Works Summit which presents a unique atmosphere for ideation, engagement, networking and knowledge sharing. I find the demand-driven skills development session most appealing because it addresses issues that coincide with my interests. I believe there is a clog in the system that disrupts young people’s transitions from school to the workplace in many sectors of the economy. This is especially true in my country where the majority of college graduates resort to street vending after failing to secure employment. I am confident I will gain an in-depth understanding of the underlying issues of this challenge from discussions at the Summit.

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