Kenyan youth discover a promising future in farming
Purity Karemi was enrolled in a FAO training as part of an agribusiness project. The programme targeted youth in the area and prepared them to work in commercial agricultural product.
Purity’s watermelon crop is growing well. From this plot alone Purity has harvested five tonnes. ©FAO/Sven G. Simonsen
Purity Karemi didn’t plan on becoming a farmer. The 25-year-old went to university in Nairobi to get a degree in procurement and management, and both she and her family expected she would stay on in the bustling city. But an FAO training changed all of that.
In early 2017, Karimi was enrolled in a FAO training on youth and agribusiness in her home county of Tharaka-Nithi, in Kenya. This training is part of an agribusiness project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The programme targeted youth in the area and prepared them to work in commercial agricultural production. Purity and her peers learned about good agricultural practices, agricultural water management, agribusiness and nutrition knowledge and practices. “The training got me really motivated, and I asked my father if he would let me try to farm some of the family’s land”, she explains.
Using the allowance she had received from FAO, she bought sweet potato vines.
A few months later, she harvested sweet potatoes, worth almost four times as much as she invested!
Now, Purity has added two new crops to her land: watermelon and capsicum. At the end of 2018, she made her first sale of five tonnes of watermelon to Twiga Foods, a buyer introduced to her by FAO. Companies like Twiga are introduced to producers because they buy directly from the farmers at competitive prices and, more importantly, pay in a timely manner.