EKYAN at Africa Skills Week

Lessons from EKYAN: Building Trust, Data, and Markets

Africa’s youth don’t lack talent; they lack orchestration - the connective tissue between skills, trusted markets, and finance. That’s the core premise of EKYAN (Engaging Kenyan Youth in Agriculture & Nutrition), our youth-led, school-anchored, digitally enabled program in Kenya.

At #AfricaSkillsWeek in Addis Ababa, our EKYAN voices, Kelfin Mwambia (Kuza Mentor) and Baroness Mithamo (Agripreneur & Macadamia Aggregator, Kirinyaga) didn’t present slides; they presented the success story of EKYAN:

✅ Curiosity beats perfection - “Start small, learn fast, scale what works.” Weekly tracking of SMART goals compounds momentum.

✅ Trust is the currency - Transparency, reliable prices, and simple contracts repair broken linkages and lower risk for farmers, aggregators, and buyers.

✅ Data unlocks doors - Daily records and unit economics make youth credit-ready and market-worthy.

This is EKYAN in practice: mentors who map strengths to value chains, open buyer doors, and turn it into disciplined action; agripreneurs who aggregate fairly, and earn the right to scale.

If policy, finance, and value chains align around these principles, youth won’t just practice agriculture, they’ll professionalize it. County by county, they’ll build resilient local economies that feed communities, create dignified jobs, and prove that structure + markets + mentorship beats potential, every time.

From EKYAN’s classrooms and demo plots to Africa Skills Week’s stage, the message is the same: skills are the spark; trust, data, and markets are the oxygen. Let’s scale what works.

#AfricaSkillsWeek #EKYAN #YouthInAgriculture #AgriPreneurs #MarketLinkages #FinancialDiscipline #Nutrition #KuzaBiashara

Sriram Bharatam Bharathi Bharatam Sheena Raikundalia Sreekanth M Raghavan Rachael Omieno Daniel Oboya UNICEF Kenya Generation Unlimited

Read the original post on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kuzaone_africaskillsweek-africaskillsweek-ekyan-activity-7384903701506912256-L3CJ