Oyo State Youth in Agribusiness Programme

Oyo State has some of the youngest population in Nigeria and each year, millions of its young people seek to enter the workforce, too many without success.

The future of Oyo State depends on its youth and as OYSADA works to transform the economy of the State through building more integrated supply chains and ensuring greater rural-urban connectivity in many areas, new opportunities are emerging for young people to start up and run profitable agribusinesses.

To do this, however, they need a range of skills and knowledge – agricultural, financial, entrepreneurial – as well as a broader environment of youth-targeted policies and investments.

The Youth in Agribusiness Programme will leverage partnerships with development partners, private sector actors and financial agencies to remove the many hurdles youth including women face in trying to earn a livelihood from agriculture and agribusiness.

The Programme will provide entrepreneurship development projects that link youth with access to agricultural resources, credit facilities, improved technologies, practical skills, markets as well as other logistics and services for agribusiness success.

Our Incubation Centres such as the soon-to-be-completed IITA-Oyo State Agribusiness Park Center, Awe, one of many to be built/revamped across all regions of the State will provide the environment where the potential and talents of 10,000 young people will be nurtured yearly, leading to the establishment of successful new agribusiness ventures and services across the entire agricultural value chain in Oyo State.

The potential returns of capturing the opportunity to engage today’s young people in agribusiness in terms of food security, poverty reduction, employment generation, as well as peace and political stability are enormous.