by J. Bazinet *
After observing rural youth in many different parts of the world, I have come to realize how difficult it is to generalize about them. Situation varies considerably from one region to another, from one country to another, and sometimes from one village to another. Any analysis must take into account the context of the culture in which young people are being socialized. This context will to a large extent determine the role given young people within the family, as production units, as a social group, and within the rural community. And since the rural society is where the culture of a country is maintained in its traditional form, cultural differences between countries, and therefore differences in the situation of rural youth, are most extreme in rural areas.
These differences will limit the usefulness of attempts to analyze the situation facing rural youth. For instance, this situation is customarily described in terms of push-pull factors: those factors which push youth out of the rural environment and those which pull youth into urban areas. The latter factors---those attracting young people to urban centers---are well known and are similar from one country to another. But the factors pushing youth away from rural areas tend to be dependent on the particular set of conditions in each area. To be sure, international economics and national policies play a role in determining the type of life offered rural populations. But other, locally-controlled factors such as established power structures and systems of control of the factors of production also exert a strong influence. The kind of life offered a rural population in a system based on latifundia, found in some parts of Latin America, is very different from the life offered rural populations by the tribal systems in parts of Africa. These differences will in large part determine whether the roles offered young people correspond to their aspirations or become a source of conflict between them and the adult community.
Though the diversity in rural areas will handicap any attempt to discuss rural youth and formulate recommendations, I believe it can be useful to consider the situation of rural youth from three main aspects:
- rural young people as persons, and their personal development needs;
- rural young people as participants in the economic sector as producers;
- rural young people as members of their local and national communities.
The person
The development of the rural young person is promoted primarily through the family and thorugh the education system.
Through their families, young people receive the cultural heritage of their social group, a basic value system and a series of beliefs and social skills. These are generally geared to a society tuned to the past. A very large section of the rural population of the world is characterized by poverty and ignorance of modern scientific and technical knowledge. While the beliefs and skills they receive may constitute a great asset to guide them in life, they may also conflict with new knowledges and prove to be of little help in interpreting and assessing new situations.
The formal education system tries to remedy this situation and to bring young people the knowledge and skills required for development. Too often, however, it fails in its main objectives.
In spite of considerable efforts made by most countries to expand their educational systems, large sections of the rural population are not yet reached. The nature and content of education too rarely relate to the situation and needs of the rural society. Its rhythm does not follow the rhythm of agriculture, forcing parents to remove children from school when their labour is needed for planting or harvesting. Its programmes alienate children from their environment and give them aspirations, values and skills which have little use in the rural world. Poor facilities, untrained teachers, and lack of teaching materials all result in a low level of teaching and a high rate of absenteeism and dropouts.
The attempts made at giving a rural orientation to the education system have not always been successful. The introduction of agricultural subjects in the curriculum and the involvement of children in agricultural projects around the school are often handicapped by the lack of resources and by the lack of training and motivation of the teachers. Attempts to develop a whole system of rural education around the needs and activities of the rural community are often opposed by the parents, who see in them a second-rate, discriminatory type of education which deprives their children of the possibility to reach higher educational levels and to aspire to better employment opportunities in government or in town.
Many programmes have been developed in order to replace formal education or compensate for its shortcomings through a non-formal approach. The most comprehensive of these programmes try to combine basic literacy and numeracy with skill training and with productive, income-generating activities. Many of these programmes are imaginative and useful, but with the exception of some mass literacy campaigns, even those which have been established as national programmes seldom reach more than a small minority of rural young people. And, as we will discuss later on, too few of them constitute the comprehensive system generally required for the integration of rural young people as active members of their community.
Many non-formal education programmes, especially those run by youth organizations, have as their main objective the task of developing individuals able to assess their own situation and to take positive steps towards its improvement, an objective seldom taken up by the formal education system. However, here again, because of the isolation and lack of resources of rural communities, relatively few can benefit from such programmes. In addition, leadership training is a constant problem for rural youth organizations. Without properly trained leaders, these organizations cannot provide the type of developmental education referred to above.
The Producer
The integration of young people into the economic or productive sector of the rural world faces a number of obstacles which, again, vary considerably from one region to another. Since it is impossible to describe all the variations, I will only refer here to what I see as the main issues raised in this area.
The first one is the problem of land. This problem takes different aspects depending on the local land tenure system. Generally, these systems can be broken down into three groupings:
1) There are countries where land is privately owned and where a large proportion of the rural families are either landless or the owners of very small holdings which cannot accommodate their children. The unequal distribution of land is often accompanied by varied forms of exploitation which condemn these families to extreme poverty and leave no scope for an improved situation on the land for their children.
2) There are countries where land, while available to young poeple, remains under strict control of the parents or adults or chiefs, with the result that young people have to stick to traditional ways of cultivating and do not always receive their fair share of what they have produced. Such situations discourage young people who have been trained in improved methods of cultivation and often lead to the training programmes being abandoned.
3) There are countries where land is just not available anymore and regions where it is too impoverished to reward the efforts to make it productive.
Regardless of the situation obtaining in a particular area, land is always considered a precious commodity which is rarely entrusted to young people and which young people can seldom afford to acquire. By the time they are entitled to full access to it, many have already left for the cities.
Training for production is another issue. For most rural young people the only training available is what they receive from their parents. Those who attend school may even fail to receive this. Farmers' training programmes, where they exist, generally address themselves to adult farmers who own land. Agricultural training institutions are often seen by young people as a channel to government employment rather than a means of increasing their agricultural productivity in their home areas. And school-based agriculture programmes have also met problems, which I have discussed earlier in this paper.
As a result of these various difficulties only a small proportion of rural young people is formally trained for modern or improved agriculture. Unless their parents have such training and are in a position to pass it on to them, young people will not be prepared to become the type of progressive producer required for development and will not be encouraged to contemplate agriculture as a career.
Lack of training for the other types of occupation to be found in the rural areas is also a major problem. While many young people still undergo apprenticeship under village craftsmen and women, this is found less and less satisfactory both as an answer to young people's aspirations and to the needs of development.
Training offered in institutions seldom reflects the rural situation. Tools and materials, even when simple, are still often too sophisticated to be easily used in the rural environment and too expensive to be acquired by the trainees. Services offered and products made thorugh the new technologies are often too expensive for rural customers. And young people trained in institutions usually have financial expectations that cannot be satisfied with the income of a traditional village craftsman. Even if they want to return to the rural environment, most rural areas offer few opportunities for employment in non-agricultural trades or crafts. As a result, graduates of the training programmes tend to look for employment in town. Thus, programmes designed to promote employment and development in the rural areas are actually contributing to rural-urban migration.
More and more attempts are being made to overcome the problems faced by rural young people trying to find their place as producers by organising them in some form of collective enterprise, be it for agriculture, small industry, services, etc. This approach is supposed to help overcome, among other difficulties, young people lack of access to capital. It will be very interesting to hear of your experience with this approach.
I have mentioned here only a few of the main problems with which rural young people are faced when they want to find their place as producers in the rural society. These problems must be placed within the general context of a rural society which is generally among the poorest, the most deprived of basic amenities and basic services, and the least future-oriented in terms of responding to the aspirations of young people, aspirations stimulated by what they hear, see or learn of the modern world through the media, through the school, or through visits to the nearest town. It is quite natural that young people will tend to see their future as being in towns rather than the rural environment, a tendency encouraged by many of their parents, who want a better life for their children and don't think they can find it in the village.
Unless enough development takes place to offer the prospect of significant improvement of rural life, the flow of young people away from the rural areas will not be reduced. It is therefore important to make of young people an instrument of development, to give them a role in the improvement of rural conditions.
Rural youth as members of their community
The question of the place of young people in the rural society can hardly be discussed outside a definite social, cultural and political context, because the concept of youth participation will take many different forms, depending on the particular cultural context in which it is applied.
There is a saying in Latin America that "los jovenes campesinos son mas campesinos que jovenes" - the young peasants are more peasants then youth. There are sociologists who consider that in some areas of Latin America the category of rural youth does not exist, that young people enter without transition from the world of the child into the world of the adult, with all its responsibilities, if not all its rights. In other parts of the world, the access to adult responsibilities seems to be long delayed and youth seems to be extended well beyond its generally accepted chronological definition. This is the case in many rural societies of Africa or of Asia.
But no matter what the duration of youth or the cultural context governing it, it is critical that young people feel that they have a proper place and role in their community at all stages of their development. And in a rapidly changing world this is not always achieved, especially when young people are absent from the community for long periods of education and training, and return to it with knowledge and skills which they consider superior to those of their parents. The types of conflicts which can develop from such situations are well documented. There have been instances where youth programmes have been organized to help young people settle on the land outside their own communities, because generational conflict prevented them from operating under the control of their elders. However, such solutions are obviously not ideal. The goal of a harmonious and dynamic rural society cannot be achieved as long as people are encouraged to develop outside of their communities.
The problem is therefore to promote youth development as an aspect of the development of the whole community. That is to say, youth education and training programmes, whether formal or nonformal, must be an integrated part of the rural development strategy and in that strategy, the role and place of youth must be clearly identified.
Is this call for an integrated approach to rural youth development as part of an integrated approach to rural development too ambitious? Maybe. We know that integrated rural development is a very complex approach, and we know that rarely in the past have educational systems and youth programmes been part of an integrated strategy for addressing the problems of rural youth. But our shared experiences will help us evaluate the validity of this approach and the conditions under which it can be implemented.
I suggest that we look at this integrated approach in its two dimensions: the vertical and the horizontal one.
By vertical integration, I mean the relationship among the various steps in the development of the individual youth and how the various programmes and inputs which contribute to this development are part of a scheme which leads to the youth's full integration into the rural society. What steps, for instance, lead from the schoolboy to the farmer established on his own land? We know that various institutions will intervene at different stages in this process, but not necessarily as part of a coordinated scheme.
By horizontal integration, I refer to the coordination among these institutions in planning and implementing the scheme of interventions.
In conclusion, what I am advocating is a rural youth policy as part of a development policy. This goal, I think, should guide in particular our study of the role of a Ministry of Agriculture and the place and role of rural youth programmes in the rural youth development strategy.
* Interregional Adviser on Youth Policies and Programmes, United Nations, Vienna.
