Interest in youth issues surged across CGIAR in 2017. A number of CGIAR CRPs and Centers (including CCAFS, FISH, LIVESTOCK, PIM, RICE, and WLE) carried out multi-country studies, meetings and literature reviews on rural youth and employment issues.
Two examples:
- A FTA webinar on youth, hosted by the CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research, convened four prominent researchers and activists to discuss the challenges and prospects facing rural young women and men across the Global South. The webinar was the most-watched among those hosted by the Platform in 2017.
- WLE and FTA co-organized a Social Science public event in Nepal on migration, youth and agricultural transitions.
However, two separate attempts at constructing analytical frameworks for rural youth employment and entrepreneurship both suggested that ‘youth’ is not a clear and homogeneous target group, whose concerns can be addressed independently of the rest of society. These were: a scoping paper on rural youth employment by MAIZE and WHEAT CRPs, together with the Institute of Development Studies, UK; and a draft framework paper on youth and development developed by LIVESTOCK together with the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam.
A message from CGIAR’s science leaders on providing opportunities for rural youth, for meaningful employment and entrepreneurship
An approach taken by some researchers is to treat youth and gender as one of many intersecting social differences that need to be considered together as part of a broad equity agenda (termed ‘intersectionality’ by sociologists). For example, a CCAFS publication on Uptake of Climate Smart Agriculture through a Gendered Intersectionality Lens analyzed the influence of gender, age, ethnicity, education, and marital status on adoption of Climate Smart Agriculture. Similarly, FTA has published a manual for ‘making sense of intersectionality’liii for use in studying sustainable forest management.
A4NH has made significant progress in systematically integrating equity issues into its research. The CRP commissioned a review of equity in A4NH research in 2017, and plans to implement the recommendations from 2018 onwards.
CCAFS also works on some aspects of equity, including the equity and social justice impacts of adaptation and mitigation, development of frameworks and guidelines for socially equitable index insurance, and research on priority issues for pastoralist (often marginalized) communities. CCAFS and partners are also examining how a private sector-led approach to scaling up some climate change activities would impact the more vulnerable members of communities.
Photo by G. Smith/CIAT.
