For the past three years I have been privileged to have had a front seat to witnessing the transformation of young farmers lives. The collaboration between AHA and SACAU (South African Confederation of Agricultural Unions) is definitely reaping many benefits. It is very easy to claim this change in young people’s lives, in this short essay I will endeavor to unpack this transformation.
Leadership and Confidence
I will start with a young farmer from Malawi. She is a horticulturalist and resides in the capitol city of Lilongwe. By nature, she is very outgoing, but in her work as a young farmer she was very reserved and didn’t feel like she was deserving of success. Malawi like many African countries believes that men should be the drivers of agriculture and women should only play a supporting role. She did not believe that this was right.
One of the workshops that we did as part of the training in the first cohort which I co facilitated was on the power of “saying YES to oneself everyday” Earlier in the day we had done the exercise about “self-image “and she had some very powerful revelations. In the exercise of the power of saying YES to oneself every day, we shared that every day all of them should say the following to themselves:
I am a human being
I deserve to take up space without apology
My thoughts and my words always matter
We even them taught them the song of YES in Chichewa which they sang together.
This had a very profound effect on her. As she sang, I could see that she was visibly shaken. Between her self-discovery during the internal and external image exercise and this song of affirmation she finally believed that she was deserving of great success and that it was her role to be a leader in her field of agriculture and to be a role model for other women and young girls who had ambitions of being courageous, innovative, and transformative farmers. As I write this article since graduating from YLIP 2023 she has become a strong ambassador for women’s agriculture taking her message to various forums around Africa, the USA, and Europe. She shared with me that in her wildest dreams she had not envisioned her life taking such a dramatic turn – YLIP did this for me!
Being Heard
During PIJEL 2025 the collaboration between AHA and ROPPA (the Network of Farmers’ and Producers’ Organisations in West Africa) I witnessed an incredible transformation. One of the participants from the host country of Gambia had plenty to share but until we did the exercise on the art of being heard we could barely hear him. We knew he was talking because his lips were moving but as we might to try and coax him and encourage him to be louder, we could not hear him.
Then we did this exercise: We had 7 participants stand at one end of a large field and 7 at the other. The assignment was that they had to shout words on a card. They could only move forward when their counterpart at the other end of the field indicated that they heard the word. Suffice to say that the first time this exercise was done this young farmer who desperately wanted to be heard was the last one to reach his counterpart. I then gave them all the image of taking their voice and throwing it across the field. The second time he did much better and for the rest of the seminar his volume and thus his confidence improved dramatically. Just recently I had a brief check in the participants as they concluded their second module and to my surprise on zoom in a room with his colleagues, I heard him loudly and clearly ask me a question with a big smile on his face. It was actually a comment in which he expressed his happiness to finally finding his voice and being able to communicate his thoughts and ideas about climate smart agriculture with fellow farmers in his beloved Gambia.
There are so many other stories that I could share. Suffice to say that the collaboration between AHA and young farmers in South and West Africa is a game changer for the future of food security on the continent. I feel honored and privileged to work with such a dedicated team of trainers who have been my colleagues these past three years as we engage with and impart transformative concepts with the amazing young famers of Africa.
