Are Young Africans Running Away from Agriculture, or the Life They Have Seen It Offer?

It is hard to get excited about a future that looks like struggle.

You are trying to figure out what to do with your life. You want work that can pay your bills, give you room to grow and help you build something for yourself.

Then someone says, “Have you considered agriculture?”

What comes to mind?

A business you could build? Or people working hard for years and still struggling to make a living?

Your answer probably has something to do with the version of agriculture you have been exposed to.

This was one of the questions underneath my conversation with Kelvin Odoobo on Builders of Africa. Kelvin is a food systems practitioner and the founder of Shamba Pro, with more than two decades of experience across agribusiness and agritech in Africa.

His conviction is that agriculture can be a dignified, viable business. But what interested me was how he arrived there. Because he grew up seeing agriculture create wealth—and agriculture leave people desperate to do something else.

Same sector. Very different lives.

What have we taught people to see?

Kelvin spent parts of his childhood in central and western Kenya. He saw commercial maize farms, coffee farms, large pineapple estates and greenhouses. In some of those places, the wealthy people were farmers.

Then he spent time around his family’s home region near the Kenya–Uganda border. There, young people and educated people wanted to leave agriculture behind. Their parents farmed, but many were struggling to make a living.

That contradiction stayed with him.

When he received a government scholarship to study agriculture, he saw an opportunity to learn something that could help his home community. Some people around him saw something else.

You are going to university to study agriculture? To become an extension officer riding a motorcycle around the village?

Imagine being excited about a direction for your life, and the people around you treating it as evidence that you have aimed too low.

We do this with more than agriculture. We create a narrow list of respectable careers, then act surprised when everyone crowds into them. Meanwhile, other work that our communities depend on becomes something people are expected to escape.

But these perceptions do not come from nowhere.

Kelvin connected his community’s experience to a history of commodity production, including cotton, and the hardship that followed when those industries collapsed. His grandparents’ stories helped him understand why farming had become associated with poverty.

That is important. We cannot simply tell young people to change their mindset while refusing to examine what shaped it.

If the example someone has seen is years of labour without security, another motivational speech about the opportunities in agriculture will not be enough. They need to see how the work can produce a different outcome—and have a realistic way to participate.

Before you grow it, who will buy it?

I asked Kelvin how someone interested in agriculture should begin, especially someone who has already finished school and discovered that their degree is not the direction they want to pursue.

His first advice was to find a market.

Not buy land. Not choose the crop that made someone on the internet a millionaire.

Go to your local market. Ask what sells, what becomes scarce, when it becomes scarce and why. Understand what people need before committing money to producing it.

It sounds ordinary. Yet how often do we skip that part?

Someone hears that there is money in poultry. Someone else hears about watermelon. Before long, they are calculating what they will earn from a successful harvest without properly understanding who will buy it, what production will cost or what could go wrong.

The success story travelled. The conditions that made it possible did not.

Kelvin was direct:

“Start small with what you're willing to lose.”

In his network, they call that money “school fees.” You are learning your trade, and some of that learning will cost you.

That is not permission to be careless. It is a reason to keep your first experiment small enough that a mistake does not destroy your ability to continue.

He suggested manageable starting points, such as leafy vegetables, rather than immediately taking on more complex production. The particular crop still needs to make sense for your location and market. His larger point was to learn through a production cycle you can handle before expanding.

I like this because it gives ambition somewhere practical to begin.

You do not need to pretend you already understand an entire industry. You need to be willing to study one part of it properly.

A good harvest can still leave a farmer in trouble

One story Kelvin shared made the difference between agriculture and food systems much clearer to me.

His team had been working on a greenhouse tomato project. They supplied equipment and supported farmers to improve production. But growing more tomatoes did not settle the question of selling them.

Think about that.

You have helped someone produce more. From the perspective of your own assignment, things may look successful. But the farmer still needs buyers. If the tomatoes do not sell, increased production has not solved the business problem.

Kelvin and his colleagues responded by arranging for agronomists visiting the farmers to collect produce and deliver it to supermarkets in Kigali. He explained that this was an initiative by the team, rather than part of the company’s formal offering.

The farmers gained a route to market. They became more willing to order equipment. Helping with the problem beyond the equipment also benefited the equipment business.

This is what Kelvin wants agricultural professionals to understand through his book, From Agriculture to Food Systems.

Your own part can be working while the person you are trying to help is still losing.

Production interacts with markets, transport, finance, weather, policy and other people’s decisions. You cannot always control those things, but you need to understand how they affect the outcome.

The point is not that an agronomist must become an economist, transporter and banker. It is that these people need to speak to one another.

I think about this in youth development too. You can train someone and still leave them unable to progress if the next step requires a relationship, work experience or access they do not have.

We need to pay attention to what happens after the part we are proud to have delivered.

“They cannot use technology.” So what do we do?

During the conversation, I brought up something I have heard when discussing technology and agriculture: farmers cannot use phones or other devices.

Sometimes there is a real access or skills problem. But sometimes we turn that problem into a permanent description of the person.

They cannot use it. Therefore, we cannot do it. Conversation over.

My response was: teach them.

If someone needs support to use a tool, can we provide training? If they lack a device, can a responsible partnership help address that barrier? What would make participation possible?

That does not mean every farmer needs an app, or that training alone solves affordability, connectivity and trust. It means we should investigate the barrier rather than use it to dismiss the possibility.

Kelvin also challenged the image of the farmer behind some of these assumptions. Among the people he works with are educated professionals and people running other businesses who farm on the side. Some already have the devices, but would rather be known for their other work.

So even the people building solutions can misunderstand who is in the sector.

Shamba Pro grew out of Kelvin’s attempts to understand what farmers actually needed. He described moving from an initial focus on inputs towards helping farmers keep reliable records, access weather information and understand their businesses better.

Records do not remove every risk. They can, however, help someone distinguish what happened on their own farm from what they assume happened because a neighbour is complaining.

They also create a basis for conversations with buyers and financiers. That is different from promising that keeping records automatically produces a loan.

The tool should help the farmer make a better decision. Downloading it is only the beginning.

You cannot prove everything in one transaction

Kelvin made a useful comparison between fintech and agritech.

You can demonstrate a money transfer by sending someone money. In agriculture, proving the usefulness of a tool may require a whole season.

The farmer needs time to use it. The business needs time to learn what is working. Potential partners want evidence before committing resources. Someone still has to carry the cost while that evidence is being built.

This was part of the thinking behind the El Niño Farm Resilience Programme he described during our conversation. The proposed programme aimed to give 10,000 semi-commercial horticultural and poultry farmers six months of free access to tools and information, with a focus on climate-risk areas in Eastern and Southern Africa.

That was an ambition, not a result he was claiming to have achieved.

When I asked what success would mean, Kelvin spoke about actual use: whether farmers kept records, downloaded reports, understood their businesses better and gave feedback that could improve the platform.

He wanted clearer direction for the farmers, Shamba Pro and potential partners.

That is a more useful question than simply asking how many people signed up. What changed because they participated? What did we learn? What should we now do differently?

Building for Africa means learning about other Africans

We also spoke about scaling across countries. Kelvin described Africa as “a market of 54 markets.”

He shared an example of a Nigerian innovator struggling to enter Tanzania. An introduction to someone in his leadership network helped create connections and arrange appointments.

The product mattered. So did knowing someone who understood the environment and could help build trust.

Kelvin had also learned that a solution could work well in one country and still be difficult to expand if entering every new place meant rebuilding the operation. That experience influenced how he approached Shamba Pro.

I related to this. When starting Builders of Africa, I deliberately wanted the first guests to come from different countries. If we are going to speak about building Africa, we need to hear from people beyond the places we already know.

But I also pushed back on how easy cross-border exploration can sound. Travel costs, visas and passport restrictions are real. A journey that is straightforward for one African may be difficult for another.

We should not turn unequal access into a judgement about someone’s ambition.

Still, there are ways to begin learning: a conversation, a relevant community, a trusted introduction, a potential collaborator. We can demand better conditions for movement while also building the relationships available to us now.

Give people a path they can examine

I do not think every young African should become a farmer. Different people will find their contribution in different places, including elsewhere in the food system.

But agriculture should not be dismissed before someone has had the chance to understand it.

Nor should it be sold to them as easy money.

If you are considering it, begin with the market conversation Kelvin recommended. Speak to sellers and producers. Ask about demand, costs, losses and the things a success story leaves out. Then decide whether there is a small, manageable way for you to learn.

For those already building businesses, programmes and tools in the sector, we have a responsibility too. We need to show more than possibility. We need to help make the path workable.

Because if we want young people to stop seeing agriculture as a life to escape, we must help build an agricultural sector they have good reason to choose.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/IB_qR3_Uj0Q

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer, iHeartRadio and YouTube Music: https://obafelakilla.com/boa