EDITORIAL: Youth in agribusiness must make the most of new partnership

A new five-year partnership agreement between Rwanda Youth in Agribusiness Forum (RYAF) and Ghanaian African Agribusiness Incubation Network (AAIN) was on Wednesday signed to support youth in agribusiness. The signing ceremony alone helped open the minds of many youths to some of the cardinal rules in entrepreneurship: setting out with a positive mindset toward investment. AAIN has pledged to package the four elements of human capital, infrastructure, technology, seed investment and policy framework into a collaborative framework between the African Agribusiness Incubator Network and the Government of Rwanda to achieve its targets. World over, economies are grappling with job demands. Institutions of learning are churning out more and more graduates against an ever shrinking job market. This has left the most viable option for many job hopefuls, especially the youth, being entrepreneurship. The partnership hopes to build youth capacity to learn successful businesses using incubation models particularly mentoring. Needles to say, this is within the vision of the Government of Rwanda vis-à-vis creating jobs for the youth. Learning from experiences from across the continent and gaining from mentorship programmes is not something, the youth who are eager to get their footing in the increasingly challenging entrepreneurial world get every day. This is a godsend opportunity the youth should grab with both palms. It even gets more interesting that the partnership hopes to direct investment in youth trade as well as ensuring that there is output and input market infrastructure development for the products that are produced by the Rwandan youth. Opportunities will always present themselves in many forms. But not everyone can benefit from them. It takes grit, determination and shrewdness to be among those who leave the pot of opportunity with the honey harvest. This RYAF-AAIN deal is one such pot. The youth should invest energy, time and their all in reaping from it.

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EDITORIAL: Youth in agribusiness must make the most of new partnership