Youth Inclusion in Rural Transformation

Abstract

The increasing numbers of rural youth in developing countries and their perceived disenchantment with the society and economy have raised policy concerns across the developed and developing world. Youth (ages 15 to 24) make up one in five people in developing countries, and one in eight in the developed world. Of the 1.2 billion youth in the world, nearly 1 billion reside in developing countries, and their numbers are growing far more rapidly than in higher-income countries. Despite the increasing number of institutional publications on youth issues, rigorous research to put these numbers into perspective and to shed light into their challenges and opportunities in economic, political and civic participation to guide their inclusion in rural transformation is remarkably limited. This special section brings together five papers that make use of the most up to date and comprehensive data sets and analyses on rural youth to address these research gaps. They provide an overall understanding of the contexts (economic sectors, spatial distributions, welfare outcomes, gendered differences, and civic participation) in which rural youth live and work, and expand the nascent literature that can support the design and targeting of policies to ensure rural youth inclusion in rural transformation.

1. Introduction

Youth is universally a distinct human developmental stage, a time of transition from dependence to independence, marked by critical decisions that affect the future of the individual and the broader society (International Fund for Agricultural Development [IFAD], 2019). A positive youth trajectory concludes with the development of a mature adult who has a positive sense of self, has developed agency, and a set of core competencies and skills for engaging effectively with the economy and society. A negative trajectory does not develop self-esteem and agency, and may lead to risky or destructive behaviour such as teen pregnancy, crime and violence, poor health habits, and disengagement from society, all of which can lead to household poverty, and lower economic growth. With so much at stake, it is clear why youth development is such an important issue for development research and policy.

It is an especially important issue now for several reasons. First, youth constitute a high share of the population – currently about one in five – in low-income countries compared to only one in eight across high-income countries (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs), Population Division [UNDESA], 2017). Further, 778 million youth live in rural, semi-rural and peri-urban areas in developing countries (IFAD, 2019). Second, the absolute number of youth is rising rapidly in least transformed countries (primarily in Africa), even as youth numbers have plateaued and begun to fall in the rest of the developing world (Stecklov & Menashe-Oren, 2019). High shares of rural youth and rapidly rising youth numbers pose major challenges for low-income countries that need to invest to improve their citizens’ future. Third, despite considerable economic progress, the rising aspirations of young people may be outpacing the expansion of their economic and social opportunities as the nature of work continues to evolve (World Bank, 2019).

Finally, the unprecedented speed and startling new nature of technological change drives equally rapid social and economic change. This pace and nature of change is driven by the advancing wave of digital technology penetrating every aspect of people’s lives – most obviously in high-income countries but also in the lowest income countries. Keen awareness of youths’ aspirations and of the potential negative outcomes if they are not met, only intensifies the sense of urgency on the part of policy-makers.

While policy concerns have been raised across the developed and developing world, the literature on rural youth and their inclusion in rural transformation is remarkably limited. Despite the increasing number of publications on youth issues (especially youth employment) from many institutions (Barsoum, Wahby, & Sarkar, 2017; International Labour Organization [ILO], 2010, 2017; OECD, 2018; Pieters, 2013; World Bank, 2006; World Bank & IFAD 2017), rigorous research on rural youth that is comparative across and within countries and based on comparable, representative data sets is rare. For example, little can be found that compares age-disaggregated employment across sectors of rural and urban economies, and rigorous impact evaluations of youth training programs are sparse (Blattman, Fiala, & Martinez, 2014, 2018; Tripney et al., 2013). An urban bias to date has permeated the literature on youth employment (Fox, 2019; Fox & Kaul, 2018) and on youth political and civic participation.

This special section brings together five papers that make use of the most up to date and comprehensive data sets on rural youth to address these research gaps both conceptually and empirically. Each of these papers started as background papers for the 2019 Rural Development Report: Creating Opportunities for Rural Youth (IFAD, 2019), which sought to advance research in the area of rural youth. Beginning with ‘Rural youth welfare along the rural-urban gradient: An empirical analysis across the developing world’ (Arslan, Tschirley, & Egger, 2020), these papers aim to enhance understanding of rural youth and the context in which they live, work, and become full participants in their countries’ economic, social, and political systems. Dolislager et al. (2020) and Abay, Asnake, Ayalew, Chamberlin, and Sumberg (2020) document how rural youth engage in the economy focusing on, respectively, agri-food system employment in 13 developing countries, and the overall rural economy in sub-Saharan Africa. Heckert, Pereira, Doss, Myers, and Quisumbing (2020) analyse the specific challenges young rural women face. The special section ends with a final paper by Trivelli and Morel (2020), which provides evidence on the conditions under which the social and civic participation of rural youth can be harnessed for inclusive rural transformation.

2. Rural youth livelihoods, challenges and opportunities

Arslan et al. (2020) use survey data on 170,000 households from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, global geo-spatial data, and an economic geography framework to assess how rural youth livelihoods are conditioned by three factors: the characteristics of their national economy, the local physical spaces in which they reside, and the households of which they are a part. They assess trends in youth numbers, shares in population and rural/urban distributions; analyse the characteristics of physical spaces where they live and their welfare implications; and finally analyse the existence and drivers of potential poverty and income penalties rural youth may face.

Five findings of Arslan et al. (2020) contribute to rural youth discourse in developing countries. First, the youth share in population is falling rapidly, and youth numbers are stable or falling slowly everywhere, except in Africa, where youth share is rising and set to double in 30 years. The ‘youth challenge’ must be understood and approached differently depending on these trends. Second, large majorities of rural youth live in spaces that are not inherently limiting: two-thirds live in zones with highest agricultural potential, and one-quarter also live in places with highest commercialisation potential. The 4 per cent that live in inherently challenging spaces are concentrated in pockets of persistent poverty in middle-income countries. This provides basis for some optimism that large shares of rural youth will be able to respond to broad policies that facilitate knowledge- and skills development and promote robust and inclusive economic growth.

Third, while the commercial potential of rural spaces has large impacts on welfare outcomes, their agricultural potential has no detectable impact. Further investments in market- and informational connectivity will pay large dividends for rural youth. Fourth, households with young members face income- and poverty ‘penalties’ in all regions and spaces within them, compared to households without young members. The poverty penalty declines sharply over space as commercial potential rises, but the income penalty shows ambiguous patterns. Fifth, households with young members earn lower relative returns to education, with varying patterns over space. These patterns, and in particular the unclear pattern over space with respect to income and returns to education, call for further research to be better understood.

Dolislager et al. (2020) use the same data as Arslan et al. (2020) but at the individual level (covering 460,654 people) to explore youth employment across the rural-urban continuum (that is hinterland, intermediate, peri-urban and urban areas). Using full-time equivalents (FTEs), they compare time allocation across six sectoral and functional employment categories (own-farming, farm-wage labour, and wage-employment and self-employment in and outside of the agrifood system (AFS)).¹ This breakdown allows detailed comparison of youth economic activities across geographies. Key findings include that the post-farm portion of the AFS absorbs large shares of rural youth’s labour: 21 per cent in Africa and Asia, and 23 per cent in Latin America. Within the AFS, the share of time spent in wage employment as opposed to self-employment is substantially lower in rural Africa (25%) than in Asia and Latin America (75%). Own-farming share in FTEs of employed rural youth is far higher in Africa than in Asia and Latin America (51% vs. 19% and 12%, respectively). Interestingly, adults in rural Africa spend much less of their work time (36%) on own-farming than youth, contrary to the notion that youth are leaving agriculture. Regression analysis shows that being in school does not reduce youth’s employment in own-farming, but does reduce LFP in general and employment in the non-farm sector. It also shows that living in a peri-urban area sharply increases youth’s AFS and non-AFS employment compared with hinterland areas, where youth depend more on own-farming.

Abay et al. (2020) use a similar approach to Dolislager et al. (2020), but focus on six sub-Saharan African countries and the ‘landscapes of opportunities’ in which rural youth live. While much has been said in recent years about the importance of rural youth in sub-Saharan Africa’s development, the factual data about how African youth currently engage in rural economies remain sparse. Similar to Arslan et al. (2020), this paper uses an economic geography framework to show that ‘landscapes of opportunity’ – defined by economic remoteness and agricultural potential – are an important way of assessing the opportunities available to rural youth. The paper finds that rural youth participate in agriculture at similar rates to older people, but that participation in non-farm wage employment and business activities changes with age, peaking in the 30s. The likelihood of reporting no activity is greatest for people in their 20s. As expected, in more remote locations, people leave school earlier and are less likely to engage in the non-farm sector, compared with people in more accessible places. Further, the paper finds that the non-farm economy is more diversified in relatively more accessible places, offering a larger set of options for economic engagement. A key conclusion from the paper is that efforts to develop a ‘youth lens’ for rural development should complement the mainstays of rural investment strategies such as infrastructure, education, and agricultural research and development.

Building on these three papers, Heckert et al. (2020) use frameworks on gendered transitions to adulthood to analyse nationally representative, sex-disaggregated data from 36 countries. The paper analyses how structural transformation (measured as the share of GDP from non-agriculture) and rural transformation (agricultural value-added per worker) differentially affect land ownership, labour force participation, and sector of employment of rural young women and men. They show that the two transformations have different implications for young men’s and women’s transitions to adulthood.

More structural transformation is associated with more land ownership for young men, but not for young women. It is also associated with lower probability of employment for both young rural men and women. Regarding participation in on-farm employment (among those that work), structural transformation is positively associated with on-farm employment of young women, but this relationship is negative for young men. Rural transformation, on the other hand, has weaker relationships with these outcomes. It is associated with a slightly higher probability of employment for young rural men, but not women. Instead, rural transformation is negatively associated with young women’s on-farm work and positively associated with not being in education, employment, or training (NEET). This paper also shows that for young women, being married has strong implications for livelihoods, by significantly decreasing the probability of employment and increasing the probability of being NEET, which reflects increasing domestic responsibilities. The documented differences across genders in the effects of structural and rural transformation on land ownership, employment, and livelihoods underline the importance of productive and reproductive roles in young rural women’s and men’s lives, and call for youth programming that accounts for these to support successful transitions to adulthood.

Examining the existing literature on participation and youth-focused public policies and development programs, Trivelli and Morel (2020) analyse the extent to which these policies and programs consider rural youth’s opinions, capitalise their assets and connect them to stakeholders in partnerships to bridge spatial and generational gaps. The paper reviews 54 participation mechanisms in Southern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America from 2007 to 2017 that support the inclusion of young people in decision-making processes at the national and local level. These youth participatory processes tend to be either state-driven (for instance, local assemblies) or stakeholder-driven (for instance, multi-stakeholder forums including youth groups), and regardless of how they are conceived, most lack a strategy to reach more marginalised/remote youth, especially in rural areas. The review finds that, similar to the youth employment literature, the literature on youth inclusion in public policy processes tends to have an urban bias.

While their aspirations are high and their participation in social, political and economic life is critical for developing a sense of agency, multiple layers of exclusion (including location, education, social norms, and public institutions) tend to exclude rural youth more than urban youth or adults from transformation processes. The authors assess rural youth inclusion mechanisms that can be informing, consulting, collaborating, or empowering through various examples (Head, 2011; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2017). They find that few of these recognise the impact of levels of structural and rural transformation in intervention areas on the effectiveness of their interventions, or embed their interventions into long-term rural development programs. Effective rural youth participation mechanisms need to address these shortcomings in their frameworks and action plans to support a youth-centred (as opposed to youth-focused) rural transformation.

3. Implications for policy and research

Several directions for policy approaches to the ‘youth challenge’ in developing countries emerge from the papers in this special issue. First, an overall conclusion is that much of the policy needed to benefit rural youth is simply good rural development policy, which provides opportunity to the overall rural population: focusing on youth opportunity where there are few options for anyone does not advance the youth agenda. This broad conclusion is supported by Arslan et. al.’s finding that large majorities of youth live in areas that are not inherently limiting but nonetheless present high rates of poverty, and by the finding that increasing commercial potential has a large effect on rural youth welfare. The paucity of evidence for returns to youth training programs (Fox & Kaul, 2018) also supports this idea.

Second, productivity, connectivity, and agency – central to youth’s successful growth and launching into broader society – are interdependent and reinforce each other. For example, farmers or rural micro-entrepreneurs will work to increase their productivity only to the extent that they enjoy market connections to absorb their increased output. Even with those market connections, they will have a hard time increasing their output without connecting to information sources about what inputs and techniques to use; and even with all these connections, they may not be able to use the information and techniques they have learned about if they are not connected to financial and social networks that provide them with access to financial capital, land, and other productive assets. Finally, they will not make their greatest possible effort to forge all these connections if they do not believe that they have agency over their own lives. In short, connections – economic, social, educational, psychological, and political – allow youth to accumulate resources and deploy them in ways that increase their own productivity and incomes while generating value for society. Creating these connections requires an empowered individual able to take decisions on their own behalf.

Third, Trivelli and Morel’s paper suggests that rural development programs need to do a far better job integrating rural youth and their perspectives into program design. This includes building explicit engagement platforms that are meaningful and feasible in the setting of any particular program. This will be far easier to do where broad rural development programs are being pursued at the same time, rather than pursuing youth-focused approaches in the absence of effective overall rural development.

Fourth, the fact that young rural men and women are affected differently by structural- and rural transformations (Heckert et. al.) means that rural development programs and the youth-specific components of those programs must explicitly and differentially address the needs of each.

Finally, the post-farm segment of the AFS is a major provider of livelihoods for rural youth, especially in more densely populated rural areas. Developing cognitive and non-cognitive skills among youth to work as employees in emerging small- and medium-scale agribusinesses, or helping entrepreneurial youth identify market opportunities and ways to exploit them, will have a high payoff.

This special issue provides an important step forward in research on rural youth, but the evidence base for determining what works in promoting rural youth development remains weak. This is at a time when developing country governments are seeking effective actions to create equitable, productive, and remunerative opportunities for a growing youth population in a very dynamic setting. The increasing availability of individual-level data that are disaggregated by age and gender, combined with big data, can facilitate more robust evidence on rural youth issues only if researchers take advantage of this powerful emerging data. Complementing the expanded use of observational data, there is need for increased rigorous impact evaluations of interventions to support rural youth. These types of interventions are expanding and need to be assessed to ensure that investments generate the highest payoffs possible. Research in these areas, done in a way that generates results that decision makers understand and can act on, is crucial for creating a more evidence-based approach to the design of strategies, policies, and investments to advance the interests of rural youth and rural people in general.

Acknowledgements

Funding for this research was provided by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The authors are thankful to all the participants of the multiple workshops held throughout the content development phase of the Rural Development Report (RDR) 2019: Creating Opportunities for Rural Youth. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The designations employed and the presentation of material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of IFAD concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or  concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The designations “developed” and “developing” countries are intended for statistical convenience and do not necessarily express a judgement about the stage reached in the development process by a particular country or area.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. AFS jobs include post-farmgate employment in food processing, wholesale, logistics, retail, and food service sectors.