📋 Tender Overview
Project ID
180325
Thematic Priority
Creating Shared Prosperity
LocationAfrica
Project ManagerEdme KOFFI
Donor
Special Resources for Africa
Fund
Special Resources for Africa (SRA)
Gender Marker2B (GE/women's empowerment is main focus)
Africa has the world’s youngest population which is growing rapidly; the choices, opportunities and constraints of young people will play a major role in shaping Africa’s future development The significance of integrating youth in the agriculture sector, in particularly in rural areas, is to address the challenge of decent and sustainable employment that is coupled with rapid urbanization and work-related migration. This project is in line with the scope of a UNIDO Initiative for youth employment of young women and men in Africa with a special focus in Agri-business. It is also in line with UNIDO’s ISID mandate, the Medium-Term Programme Framework 2018-2021, and in accordance with the resolution on the Third Industrial Development Decade for Africa (IDDA 3), the African Union’s Agenda 2063, The Africa We Want (covering the period 2015–2063), and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on financing for development. In 2018, earlier discussions between UNIDO, AUC-DTI, UNECA, ECOWAS, and COMESA agreed on the need to build on recent and detailed studies on value chain development conducted by UNIDO, in the view of identifying the entry points for women and youth entrepreneurship and employability in selected value chains in several countries in Africa, by designing and implementing relevant interventions accordingly. Furthermore, this project will seek to address the challenges faced by Africa’s unemployed urban and rural young women and men in agri-business related activities. The initiative will contribute to providing youth with decent jobs opportunities in agri-business related activities, including Agriculture 4.0 and circular economy. It will focus on practical, high impact solutions aimed at creating opportunities through interventions that train youth for the job market or help connect them with job opportunities (this includes both becoming self-employed or salaried workers) and interventions that promote the creation of new jobs within existing employers, create new enterprises with job vacancies for youth, or improve the quality of existing jobs. Given the fact that both cassava and cashew are among the 5 priority commodities of the African Development Bank, highlighted in its Agriculture and Agribusiness Strategy (2015 - 2019), the project will focus on those two commodities in the pilot phase. Cassava is one of the most important staple food crops in Africa contributing about 37% of the dietary energy requirements of Africans (IITA). It is a priority commodity in the following four Regional Economic Communities (RECs): ECOWAS, COMESA, EAC and ECCAS. It is one of the strategic commodities (at sub-regional level), prioritized by the African Union at the 2006 Abuja Food Security Summit. Cashew has become an
