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Inclusive Value Chains

OYA works with the stakeholders at all levels of value chains: higher learning institutes, public and private actors, and service providers towards a better enabling environment for agribusiness development. Through capacity building, strengthened cooperation and networking, all actors benefit from enhanced synergies and from the exchange of best practices across businesses, systems and regions.

OYA is strenghtening 17 value chains across the six pilot countries. Some of the selected value chains include:

Selecting value chains

In each OYA country, the main strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges of youth employment in the agricultural sector were analyzed through a baseline survey. Based on a number of factors, such as alignment with current government sector development priorities, agroecological zones, youth preferences, potential for innovation and technology application, gender and cross cutting issues, the value chains that carry high potential for job creation were selected.

The recommendations of the baseline analysis were presented at the national level to the key stakeholders from the public and private sector, as well as civil and youth organizations, who discussed and defined the priority value chains for each country, on which OYA would focus.

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Developing synergies

In order to leverage the achievements of existing initiatives focusing on strengthening value chains, OYA built partnerships with other projects adopting a similar approach to build competitive agri-food systems.

  • “Competitiveness and trade for selected value chains (MarkUp)” in Kenya;

  • “Revival of the Pineapple Industry” in Guinea;

  • “Improving the Competitiveness of the Mango Sector” in Guinea-Bissau

  • “Investment for new Employment Opportunities” in Senegal

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The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)
on agripreneurship for Africa

The MOOC combines the entrepreneurship best practices with Personal Initiative (PI) and the agri-value-chain approach championed by FAO. Splitting the participants into a training group and a waiting control group, the pilot aims to test the MOOC’s impact on agripreneurial self-efficacy, agripreneurial planning, agripreneurial action, and business practices. There is an emphasis on peer-to-peer learning and exchange between the trainees from different countries.

In 2021, 247 young agripreneurs from the target value chains of aquaculture, fisheries, cocoa, groundnuts, etc. in Ghana and Kenya were included in the expanded pilot of the course.

Toward Strengthening Regional Agro-Processing
Value Chains in the Sahel

At the occasion of the 2021 Africa Industrialization Week, OYA participated in a high-level panel discussion on the theme “Toward Strengthening Regional Agro-Processing Value Chains in the Sahel”, which followed a 3-day capacity development and consultative workshop aiming to work with small-scale actors along specific agro-processing value chains, in order to identify key activities for the programme on regional value chain development in the Sahel.

The 8 panelists discussed:

  • The priority areas to support capacity development for MSMEs in agro-industrial regional value chains in the Sahel;

  • The key challenges and opportunities for the regional agro-industry in the region;

  • The opportunities and challenges anticipated by the implementation of the AfCFTA for the agro-industrial sector in Africa;

  • The role and experience of UNIDO in supporting agro-industry development in Africa;

  • The existing collaborative programmes with AUDA-NEPAD that could be leveraged to support the regional agro-industrial value chains;

  • The key business incubation and capacity development needs for MSMEs; and

  • The mechanisms for PPP to support the regional value chain development.

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