Youth at the Centre of Food Systems
- ABComms
- 37 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Africa's food systems are already being rebuilt by the youth.
In Zimbabwe, a 23-year-old is turning recycled plastic tubing into a drought-proof farm. In Kisii, a 21-year-old university student has put a veterinarian in every farmer's pocket. In North Kivu, families who spent years in displacement camps are rebuilding soil and seed systems from nothing, with women carrying much of that labour. In Kitwe, a 23-year-old is turning recycled plastic tubing into a drought-proof farm. In Kisii, a 21-year-old university student has put a veterinarian in every farmer's pocket. In North Kivu, families who spent three years in displacement camps are rebuilding soil and seed systems from nothing, with women carrying much of that labour.
This is what the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) was designed to produce: a continent-wide commitment to agriculture-led growth, delivered through the people closest to the ground. These are not side stories to that agenda. They are the agenda, at the scale where it actually gets tested.
This matters because the frameworks are already in place. Zambia's food systems resilience plan. Kenya's draft agricultural data and digital policy. The African Agricultural Leadership Institute's agreements with the DRC's Ministry of Agriculture. Governments across the continent have written down what a modern, climate-resilient, youth-driven agriculture sector should look like. Journalism is the tool that turns those commitments into evidence. It translates science and policy into lived experience, and it holds that lived experience up against the framework to confirm what is actually working, and where the gap between policy and practice still sits.
Doing that well takes more than good instincts. It takes working knowledge of the frameworks themselves. That is what the Storytelling for Food Systems Masterclass was built to provide: equipping journalists with current, working knowledge of the frameworks enabling agriculture's transformation across Africa, from climate resilience to soil health to digital innovation. The masterclass gave reporters the grounding to do more than describe hardship. It gave them the tools to interrogate whether policy is reaching the ground, and to identify where young innovators are already ahead of it.
The reporting grant that followed, with support from the Leveraging Knowledge Management to Enhance Policy Harmonization and Domestication for Agricultural Transformation in East and Southern Africa project, AGRA and FANRPAN, put that training into practice. Three journalists went into the field. Three stories came back. Each one holds a youth innovator to the same standard: what are they actually building, what evidence backs their claims, and what would it take for their model to reach beyond one district, one county, one commune.
Hydroponics: Farming Zambia out of Poverty
By Cindy Sipula
Eugine Mubika is 23. His company, Cosma Agro Solutions, runs hydroponic systems across three peri-urban districts of Zambia's Copperbelt, Masaiti, Kitwe, and Ndola, using recycled plastic tubing to grow food without soil or rainfall dependence. The story tests his model against the aftermath of Zambia's 2023/2024 drought, which affected an estimated 9.8 million people, and against the country's own food systems resilience strategy through interviews with the National Food and Nutrition Commission. It also shows the model replicating organically: Mary Muliyunda, a resident of Kitwe's Chimwemwe Township, is now growing vegetables in water bottles using techniques she learned directly from Mubika.
How Youth-Led AI Solutions are Transforming Livestock Farming
By Julius Ongwae
Polycarp Orenda, 21, built Aniwise while still a student at Kisii University. The app lets farmers photograph a sick animal and receive a diagnosis in seconds. The story does not take Orenda's numbers on faith. It traces his accuracy figures to internal validation against labelled datasets and ties his growth claims to specific in-app engagement metrics rather than raw downloads, then puts those claims in front of a beneficiary farmer, a co-developer, a university department chair, and the county's veterinary services director. The result is an assessment of where AI genuinely strengthens livestock management, and where it still depends on the field officers and vaccination programmes it cannot replace.
Resilience in the fields: potato farming under conflict in North Kivu
By Daniel Buuma
In Kibumba, families are returning to potato farming after more than three years displaced by conflict, into a commune that has been under M23 control since 2023. The story quantifies what that displacement cost: farmer Shunguhinga planted 200 kilograms of potato seed and harvested 173. It documents the degraded soil left by fields farmed without consent during the displacement, and the women who continue to anchor food production despite limited access to land, financing, and extension services. It closes on the same policy question the whole grant was built to ask: the DRC has the arable land to feed two billion people, but without security, seed access, and coherent agricultural policy behind it, that potential stays theoretical.
