Enable TAAT provides a good networking forum for farmers and youth to share different ideas and knowledge about agribusiness as a means of developing their capacity, promoting, and showcasing products of youth-led enterprises to increase their income.

Through youth advocacy programs, we guide youth toward agribusiness incubation and youth-led enterprise development. To achieve this objective, ENABLE-TAAT crafts partnership with other youth empowerment projects or fora, donor community, governmental agencies, private institutions, with the aim to reach a large number youth from every sector.

Agribusiness advocacy helps the youth to see the opportunities across value chains. Apart from youth, rural farming communities often benefit from such programs and request for mentorship or linkage with improved planting varieties.Youth advocacy assumes a number of forms: Open field day events, conferences, focus group discussions, panel discussions, exhibition programs, media materials and promotional materials.

ENABLE-TAAT has successfully carried out advocacy programs in Republic of Benin, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. With an initial target of 115, 500 youth in Africa, the compact has reached up to 116,622 youth across host countries, motivating them to develop agribusiness careers and providing required support.

This is a major mechanism that links youth groups to technologies among the nine TAAT Commodity Value Chains. Beneficiaries are grouped in commodity clusters and encouraged to jointly manage the ‘business’. This provides a hands-on experience for the youth, who are putting theory into practice while gaining access to quality input and mentorship for good management practices.

Our approach is based on the ‘Agribusiness Park’ model: a network of nutritional food basket demonstrations to disseminate TAAT’s improved varieties to target groups (mostly youth), providing a soft-landing for them in the youth-led agribusiness community.

ENABLE-TAAT Agribusiness Incubation programs expand experiential learning across all TAAT value chains. It is the bedrock of learning and skill development within the agripreneur movement. From 2018-2021, this pathway has engaged over 4,500 youth in seven countries, in intensive agribusiness orientation and capacity development programs, accompanied with a system of mentorship in support of these actions. Each new agribusiness incubation operates across a specific commodity or fairly narrow set of TAAT value chains, based upon special advantage in the locality or to the beneficiaries. Each incubation caters to 20 or more beneficiaries at a time; they may be divided into sub-groups with their own value chain preferences and task assignments.

Other aspects of incubation include modules on soft skills, such as emotional intelligence, business communication, business development and leadership management. Trainees are also taught to write business plans and advised to form a cooperative society to power their business ideas to reality. Training methodologies include lecture presentations using ICT, audio-visual presentations, practical field demonstrations, case studies, cluster assignments, and individual tasks.

The core objective of ENABLE-TAAT is to address the economic marginalization of youth across Africa, by facilitating youth engagement with agricultural value chains in a profitable way. During the first phase, ENABLE-TAAT successfully equipped more than 5000 youth with improved skills in agricultural enterprise development.