Youth, Skills and Work: Why we need contextualized education

By Grace Mwaura 

Introduction

At a conference on young people, farming and food in Africa, I was glad to discuss with leading researchers and practitioners in the field of young people and agriculture in Africa, the subject of education and training as a priority for the agrifood-youth nexus. Thinking of Youth, Skills and Work, I have no better words to explain why I stress contextualized education and training, than to refer to my conversations and paper[i] at the conference and a recently published blog by the New Agriculturalist and few blogs i have previously written.

For the purpose of this blog, I will however focus on the overall workforce in Africa: demographic dividend[ii] and not only the agrifood sector. I challenge the emerging notion that agrifood sector in Africa presents major opportunities to solve the pre-conceived and framed youth challenge of unemployment. Indeed, as I will show through education and training, the biggest challenge is in the structures of the preparing the workforce for whatever socio-economic sector.

The context

Education and training remains priority for the future of young people. It is however contested whether education on its own is adequate to guarantee improved livelihoods and economies, whether education has limits, or whether education systems should be changing to accommodate the transforming social economic and political times and spaces. I am struck by the words of the Late Prof. Wangari Maathai, who in her book[iii], The ‘Challenge for Africa’ lamented how the elite people trained in agriculture at her time did not value working in rural Africa, and instead preferred white-collar jobs in the city. For decades, farming, like other rural activities, was framed as an activity of the poor, uneducated and immobile people in the village.  Education was viewed as the solution to save one from being a poor farmer in the future. In school, agricultural education was not presented as an integral part of the daily life of an individual, even though their daily encounters included helping their parents on their farms or in the market. In some cases, school gardens were used as punishment for wrong doing, instead of being living laboratories to teach students how to grow food. It’s no wonder that the budget allocations[iv] to agricultural development, education and research declined in most Africa countries in the period of 1980s to early 2000, while overall the ODA increased in real terms. We can therefore agree with Prof. Maathai that indeed we have a challenge:

“…Disempowerment- whether through a lack of self-confidence, apathy, fear, or an inability to take charge of one’s own life- is perhaps the most unrecognized problem in Africa today. To the disempowered, it seems much easier, or even more acceptable to leave one’s life in the hands of third parties…” Wangari Maathai, 2009:199 The Challenge for Africa.

Education then, is certainly not the liberation[v] or empowerment that we always envision in our normative understanding of development. But we should not underestimate its ability to re-orient this power and liberations in different contexts. We should, therefore, question the nature and form of empowerment and liberations that education provides to learners. We have to concern ourselves with the quality and delivery of pedagogy to meet the needs of a transforming continent. The kind of education needed for a revolutionizing continent should be dynamic enough to accommodate the needs for sovereignty, improved livelihoods, growing economies and even more, democratic states.  We thus need to move to new frontiers in education.

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