28/08/2026
Day 1 of the Africa Youth Agrifood Academy in Kigali - three days convened by the African Union, AGRA and AUDA-NEPAD before the Africa Food Systems Forum opens.
One question from this morning has stayed with me all day:
“In your country, where are young people treated as beneficiaries, and where are they genuinely shaping decisions, investments and implementation?”
In Lesotho, the honest answer is that we are counted more often than we are consulted. Youth appear in the targets of most agriculture programmes. We appear far less often in the rooms where those programmes are designed, priced and reviewed.
We spent the afternoon mapping one youth agrifood issue into our national policy and implementation cycle. Mine was finance - not whether it exists, but the terms attached to it. A grant facility can be genuinely well designed and still exclude the businesses it was written for, if it asks a young company to produce a third of the money in cash before anything is disbursed.
That is a design question, not a complaint. And the CAADP Kampala Implementation Guidelines we worked through today put design squarely inside the cycle where youth can engage - governance, diagnostics, investment design, and mutual accountability.
Two more days here, then the Investment Room at on Monday, where I'll make the same argument to a different room.
