Agricultural Policy, Employment Opportunities and Social Mobility in Rural Malawi

Blessings Chinsinga and Michael Chasukwa

Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 2018, vol. 7, issue 1, 28-50

Abstract: Despite the youth accounting for more than half of the population of Malawi, they have been marginalized and pushed to the periphery of several development policy interventions. This article interrogates the question of how the youth and policy-makers view agricultural development as a means of social mobility for youth in Malawi. The paper argues that even though agricultural production is the main occupation in Malawi, young people do not value agriculture as a means of upward social mobility. Furthermore, youth and agriculture policy frameworks provide little support to youth in terms of access to affordable farm inputs, land, extension services, value addition initiatives, and markets. It is argued that Malawi is missing the strategic policy direction by not implementing non-traditional agriculture interventions that would engage the youth in a bid to reduce massive youth unemployment.

Keywords: Youth; Malawi; employment; agriculture policy; social mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2277976018758077 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:agspub:v:7:y:2018:i:1:p:28-50

DOI: 10.1177/2277976018758077

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy from Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().