BY KWANELE TSABEDZE
MBABANE – Climate adaptive youth-led agri-businesses have a bright future in Eswatini.
This was recently signified by the commitment to empower youth-led, viable enterprises in Agriculture by the Youth Enterprise Revolving Fund (YERF) and the Woman Farmer Foundation (WFF).
The two organisations formalised their partnership by signing an MoU on Friday, October 13, at the YERF offices in Mbabane.
“We are here to be able to empower the young people and look at entrepreneurship and sustainability,” said WFF founder and Director Sonia Paiva about the partnership between the two organisations.
Speaking at the signing of the MoU, YERF CEO Nkhambule emphasised that the organisation still has more milestones they are targeting which are aimed at improving the agriculture value chain and motivating commerce.
“We want to expose them to other areas of agriculture in which they are not in, such as food technology, as they currently have manufacturing with Eswatini Kitchen where they have technologists. We are looking at other products they can do to support the young people and to develop that value chain from agro-processing. At the end of the day we want them to have money,” said the YERF Officer.
He added that there is a vision for WFF to develop a school at Sidvokodvo for climate-adaptive agriculture training. He also added that they are planning to expand what they are already doing as an organisation, such as promoting market linkages for agriculture entrepreneurs.
“His Majesty spoke about how he wants Emaswati to be billionaires, so we want some of these young people to also feature in lists like the Forbes 30 under 30,” said the WFF rep when emphasising the importance of economic viability for the youth entrepreneurs who will be supported under the partnership by the two organisations.
The MoU is aimed at promoting food security and the development of agriculture value chains through capacitation and training, especially for climate-adaptive agricultural practices.
📸 Sourced from women farmer foundation
