The youth in the study said that their biggest obstacle to a career in farming was learning the digital and technical skills needed in todays’ market. Technologies such as cloud computing, soil sensors, drones have changed food production and processing – digital literacy is now a must!

he second important reasons they raised was land ownership, most youths who receive farming land get smaller pieces of land parceled out. The challenge is that young farmers must produce more yields from smaller spaces, without innovative technologies In some countries for example in Kenya, some youth are innovatively establishing youth-driven innovations which sadly do not receive political or financial support that allows for viability and scalability.

Africa is in the height of a crisis and an opportunity. Africa’s population stands at 1,2 billion people and over 60% are below the age of 25. Yet most African youths are not employed, and according to the World Bank by 2035, 350 million new jobs will be needed. Africa’s population is growing faster than jobs are created. There is a potential for agriculture to create employment, however, African youths in Sub-Saharan Africa do not realize agriculture as a profitable opportunity for livelihood. There is a growing notion that the best way to entice young people back to the farms is through making youths access information and communication technologies tailored for agriculture.

A MENA perspectiveMENA could easily follow in Kenya’s footsteps, and reap immense benefits. The adoption of mobile payment systems makes transactions cheaper, easier and safer. By simplifying how clients can pay for goods and services, it helps firms reach out to new customers and foster private sector development across the economy. Moreover, as is often the case with innovations, it has the potential to be built upon and used by other new technologies and to create a positive momentum in fintech as a whole.Governments in the Middle East and North Africa should enable digital innovation with conducive regulations and the development of a regulatory ‘sandbox’, which guarantees the security of transactions but allows for experimentation, that would stimulate the development and adoption of disruptive innovations.Today, economic connectivity is achieved by the development and harmonization of optic fibers, IT equipment, online payment systems, information transmission and data protection policies. If the MENA region puts sufficient efforts in this direction, it could propose a new path to its citizens, in particular the youth, and bring about a new development strategy adapted to the modern age.

M-Pesa (M is for mobile, “pesa” is Swahili for “money”) was launched by Safaricom, Vodafone’s Kenyan associate, on March 6, 2007. The service is designed to safely send receive and store money via a simple mobile phone. The service also allows customers to make bill payments and top-up airtime.

It has since expanded to Tanzania, Mozambique, DRC, Lesotho, Ghana, Egypt, Afghanistan and South Africa. Meanwhile services in India, Romania, and Albania have been terminated amid low market uptake. M-Pesa allows users to deposit, withdraw, transfer money, pay for goods and services (Lipa na M-Pesa), access credit and savings, all with a mobile device.

M-Pesa is widely seen as demonstrating that it is possible to make a profit while also improving the lives of the poor.[28] Tavneet Suri, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and William Jack, based at Georgetown University have produced a series of papers extolling benefits of M-Pesa. In particular, their 2016 article published in "Science" has been very influential in the international development community. The much cited result of the paper was, that 'access to M-PESA increased per capita consumption levels and lifted 194,000 households, or 2% of Kenyan households, out of poverty.[29] Global development institutions focusing on the development potential of financial technology frequently cite M-Pesa as a major success story in this respect, citing the poverty-reduction-claim and including a reference to Suri and Jack’s 2016 signature article. In a report on "Financing for Development", the United Nations write: "The digitalization of finance offers new possibilities for greater financial inclusion and alignment with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and implementation of the Social Development Goals. In Kenya, the expansion of mobile money lifted two per cent of households in the country above the poverty line."[30]

Send and receive moneyDomestic transfers: M-Pesa customers can send money in real time to any other M-Pesa customer with an account registered in the same country. In most markets customers can now send money to mobile money users on other networks as well.International transfers: Through our international remittance partners, M-Pesa customers can receive and send money across borders in real time.

LoansM-Pesa customers build a credit score that enables them to access loans via our bank partners. Products include M-Shwari and KCB M-Pesa in Kenya and M-Pawa in Tanzania. We work hard to ensure customers not only have access to credit but are also educated so they understand the implications of a loan.

Safaricom pays commission to its “agents”, usually on a monthly basis, based on metrics such as transactions per branch, customers per branch, and quantities transacted, etc. Because it takes agents a couple months to ‘ramp up’ at their branch by attracting M-Pesa customers and convincing them to start transacting, the business model of M-Pesa incurs significant up-front costs and is one of the reasons many mobile-money deployments fail in the early days. Mobile-Money becomes profitable only when it goes viral. According to a McKinsey report, to make mobile money for the unbanked commercially viable, operators and telco’s like Safaricom “must sign up 15 to 20 percent of the addressable market.”

This is mainly because of its sensational claim that ‘access to the Kenyan mobile money system M-PESA increased per capita consumption levels and lifted 194,000 households, or 2% of Kenyan households, out of poverty.’

According to this article, M-Pesa was not just making profits, but the evidence seemed to show it was also making an astonishing ‘bottom-up’ development and poverty reduction contribution. This poverty reduction claim, often cited in full in media articles, quickly became the centrepiece of the evidence used by many in the international development community to justify its increasingly strong support for, and investment in, the fin-tech model.

he core issue of individual over-indebtedness, which in Kenya is now approaching crisis levels and which has a clear and direct link to the operation of M-Pesa, was not even mentioned as a possible downside of the fin-tech development model. For such an important and well-financed project, the methodology was also weak, diverging from many of the standard ‘best practices’ in the impact evaluation field.

It is no exaggeration to say that Kenya's economy depends on M-Pesa. According to the Central Bank of Kenya, the value of all transactions between June 2013 and June 2014 represented 39 percent of the country's GDP. M-Pesa moves more than one billion Swiss francs per year, and in fiscal year 2014 it earned the parent company 268 million francs, an increase of 21.6 percent over the previous year.

It all started eight years ago – because of the family members who stayed home. As in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, most of Kenya's population are farmers who live on the land. Young people in search of an education and jobs are drawn to the cities. If those earning money in the city wanted to support their parents financially, they long had to rely on uncertain and risky methods. They could send cash with a neighbor or a bus driver who happened to be driving through their village. Or they could send a postal money order, but that could take weeks, often failed to arrive, and in any case was possible only if the recipient had a post office box. This was about as unlikely as having a bank account.At the time, in 2007, several million Kenyans owned a cell phone with a Safaricom number. Then this phone number essentially became a virtual bank account number. Starting in March of that year, Safaricom customers could upload money to their cell phone and send it to other Safaricom customers. It arrived within minutes, and the recipient was informed with a text message. The money could be forwarded or received as cash from an M-Pesa agent.Two weeks after introducing the service, Safaricom had nearly 20,000 active M-Pesa users. After seven months, there were one million. Today,  20 million customers in Kenya are registered. More than 83,000 agents in cities and rural areas assist customers in uploading, sending and receiving money. Rural Kenyans with no banking options leaped from the agricultural age straight into the digital tomorrow.And transferring money from one cell phone to another was only the start. Today, users can pay their electricity and water bills, get cash from an ATM, buy airline tickets, add phone time, buy concert tickets, pay the taxi driver or butcher and take out a small loan, perhaps to purchase a solar panel that brings electricity to their home for the first time. 

The Chinese platforms were not the only payment innovation using mobile phones at the time. Safaricom, a mobile phone operator, launched its M-Pesa payment system in Kenya in 2007, allowing people to load cash on e-wallets and send it by text. M-Pesa is now in seven countries and has its own QR-based smartphone app.

Any move to disrupt M-Pesa would have a dramatic effect on the Kenyan economy. Joshua Oigara, head of the Kenyan bank KCB Group which is a partner of Safaricom for M-Pesa, estimates that about a quarter of Kenya’s gross domestic product is processed over the platform. M-Pesa is already used to pay salaries, book bus tickets and settle invoices in most of its markets. In Kenya it has expanded into more advanced financial services including small loans, supply chain finance, insurance and a growing number of in-store and ecommerce services.