Let’s Be Young Farmers

The project of Let’s be young farmers (LBYF) aims to facilitate young marginalized groups (female and male) in rural areas to get access to farming resources and to equip them with knowledge and skills to pave the way to make farming as their decent livelihood. This is to be done through three main activities with three specific objectives:

1. Organizing rural youth to pursue access to land owned by village government (e.g. tanah kemakmuran, tanah kas desa). This objective particularly aims to provide land for the youth as basic resource to do farming.
2. Facilitating the youth to learn innovative methods in farming that include sustainable farming practices, farming product processing, and marketing of their products. These activities aim to make farming attractive for the youth, economically beneficial, and environmentally sustainable.
3. Organizing rural youth to pursue access to land owned by village government (e.g. tanah kemakmuran, tanah kas desa). This objective particularly aims to provide land for the youth as basic resource to do farming.

It is widely perceived that young people are not interested in farming. Even though we find this to be the case in many villages, our studies also indicate that there are also young people who are interested in farming. However, these young people face some difficulties in realizing their aspirations. The problems that include (i) lack of access to land; (ii) lack of knowledge to innovative and profitable ways of farming that include farming methods, farming products processing, and marketing the products; lack of political access to village funding decision making process (Dana Desa) through which they can aspire for their interests including on their access to various resources.In broader context, these three problems indicate a marginalization of youth in the village, and even national, development.

This project aims to contribute to address the problems above.

In implementing the program, we work with Komunitas 1000 Kebun (1000 Kebun Community or ‘1000K’) in Bandung and Karang Taruna Mandala Cipta in KulonProgo. The 1000K community, has been working on innovative farming methods and has developed offline and online market places in which farmers and small enterprises can sells their products to broader market. Mandala Cipta group, meanwhile, has been working on initiative in regards to providing young people access to land resources.

Our approach is to combine, modify, and contextualize these two existing practices from the two youth groups and to test the combined, modified, contextualized innovation in two target youth groups in two villages in Sukabumi and Kebumen. We contextualize the testing activities by implementing Participatory Action Research (PAR) methods in which the participants (the youth) actively involved in all stages of the program. We also facilitate learning process and knowledge transfer between the two groups model and two targeted groups so they can learn each other about their farming practices.

Along with the testing activities, AKATIGA closely study and document all processes by using qualitative methods.  We also continuously disseminate the program implementation processes through a number of online and offline platforms so that the learning processes can reach and inspire broader youth groups.

In the end of the program we expect that the program will benefit two youth groups in Kebumen and Sukabumi; youth groups (partners) in Bandung and KulonProgo, and broader youth group.