Abstract
Agripreneurship is increasingly being recognized as an important and valuable strategy to reduce the high dependency of young people on white-collar jobs as well as increase employment opportunities in the non-formal sector. Thus, it has become one of the key African governments’ investments in the creation of sustainable employment as well as improvement of livelihoods of young people. Based on this, development stakeholders in many African countries have come together in recent times to support agripreneurship by organizing agribusiness training programmes which specifically target this category of the population. Despite the numerous training interventions, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on what has worked and what has not. Using the case of Fadama Graduate Unemployed Youth and Women Support (GUYS) programme, this study used the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method to investigate the impact of agribusiness training on youth empowerment in Nigeria. A total of 977 respondents comprising of 455 participants and 522 non-participants were sampled across three states. PSM model results showed that after controlling for all confounding factors, participation in training in the Programme had about 11 percent increase in youth empowerment index score. This implied a positive change in the economic status and livelihoods of the youths who participated in the agribusiness training of the Programme. Thus, the study suggests that programmes such as the Fadama GUYS should be encouraged and out-scaled elsewhere in Africa as they can inspire youths to engage in agribusiness and thereby contribute to reduction of youth unemployment as well as enhancement of youth empowerment.
Keywords: Agribusiness, Youth empowerment, Youth unemployment, Agribusiness training