Young people with no classroom seat are being apprenticed into cassava
Across fifteen (15) universities, thousands of young people with no classroom seat are being apprenticed into cassava, dairy, vermiculture and rice-fish businesses – proof, consortium members say, that entrepreneurship training works best when it leaves the campus behind.
Not every young entrepreneur being trained under the Transforming African Agricultural Universities to Meaningfully Contribute to Africa’s Growth and Development (TAGDev) consortium has ever set foot in a university lecture hall. Many are out-of-school youth in vermiculture yards, tomato nurseries, tree-planting fields and hospitality kitchens. Therefor the TAGDev programme has a deliberate target of a continent-wide push to seed and scale youth-led agribusiness far beyond the traditional campus gate.
Across fifteen universities in the consortium, a pattern is emerging: entrepreneurship support is being built not as a single course, but as a pipeline – needs assessments, co-created curricula, hands-on apprenticeships, and finally, links to markets, mentors and capital. The businesses taking shape at the end of that pipeline range from rice-fish integration in Nigeria to coffee planting in Uganda, poultry and mushroom enterprises in Zimbabwe, and fashion design in Kenya.