Access to land a challenge for young people seeking to go into cocoa farming

Alberta Abochie   is a  24-year-old Senior High School graduate and a single mum from Leklebi Agbesia in the Volta Region. She joined the MASO Programme in 2016  with the hope, she will own a farm by the end of the  year long course. Like all her peers, she went through the cocoa agronomy class under the MASO CocoAcademy to acquire skills in cocoa cultivation.

The MASO CocoAcademy trains youth aged between 17 – 25 to become entrepreneurial farmers. The youth farmer incubator trains them in best agronomic practices, and basic financial skills as well as social skills (leadership, values & identity, rights & responsibilities, communication). The curriculum is for a 12-month period and addresses good agronomic practices specific to the cocoa sector (technical knowledge) in combination with social, financial and leadership skills (life skills).

Most of Alberta’s peers in her community and other cocoa producing areas have established farms or taken over old family cocoa farms and are applying their newly acquired skills. Alberta however is unlucky.

She is yet to secure a piece of land (about two hectares) to establish her farm. She was promised land by a family elder who later changed his mind and refused to give her the land. As a result, she couldn’t establish her farm during the start of the 2017 cocoa farming season.

“I felt so bad that I couldn’t get any family member to help me secure a land,” Alberta laments.

Despite this challenge, Alberta is determined to secure a piece of  land to start her cocoa farm in this year. Another uncle seeing her determination to go into cocoa farming has promised to give her the land she needs.

“I joined the current cohort of MASO CocoAcademy to establish their seedling nursery and have save some money from my petty trading to hire labour to clear that land, all in readiness to start my farm in 2018”, she said.

Alberta in her community ,Leklebi Agbesia

Youth Access to land – what we know

The MASO Programme is aware of the challenges of the acquiring land for farming. As a result, the programme, works with parents and community elders in areas where we operate to support the youth in accessing land for their cocoa farms. Dialogue around land is complex and long drawn but remains a priority for the programme.

A study conducted by MASO on youth access to land highlighted the following

• There is the difficulty in identifying land as many farming communities do not have any structured means of knowing what land may be available. The youth are thus forced to rely on their elderly relations in searching for land. However, in many instances, the elderly may also be in search of land and this creates the situation where the youth may be relying on their potential competitor for accessing the same land. This creates disadvantage for the youth from the onset.
• There is deep-seated perception on the part of the elderly land holders that the younger generation is lazy and many of them have no track record in cocoa farming. Therefore, land owners are more inclined to giving land to older and more experienced farmers.
• The growing land scarcity and rising cost of land access mutually reinforce each other to create the situation where the youth are more likely to access very fragmented and often poor quality land which does not provide adequate incentive to cocoa farming.

Click on this link for the full report on the Youth Access to Land Report.