UAC Rural Farm School (UAC-RUFS) is an empowerment programme under the organization’s Youth Community Agriculture Programme (YOCAP) that addresses the skill gap and lack of start-up capital among the unemployed youths to create and run a successful Agro-enterprise.
The UAC-RUFS is operated as an incubation model that sets up farms as a practical skill acquisition farms, while leveraging on the sales of the farm produce as equity fund to empower the trainees to start up their own on-farm and off-farm ventures.
The trainees remain under the mentorship of UAC to ensure success. The UAC RUFs is designed to set up farms across critical value chains such as maize, chickens, Snailry, vegetables, Cassava, Sorghum, Oil Palm, and Cocoa under the YOCAP and is focus at rural areas in an effort to revive rural economy and reduce Rural-Urban Migration by making Agriculture works for Rural Youths as Business.
UAC Rural Farm School model of the organization is particularly designed to address two key challenges facing most young people venturing into Agriculture: i.e Lack of appropriate skills for successful Agribusiness and lack of start-up capital. Most youths have the interest in Agriculture but lack the knowledge of how best to do it and eventually got more frustrated by lack of startup capital. UAC RUFs addresses these key challenges by making the farm a school to acquire practical farming skills ‘i.e. learning by doing and we use the proceed from the sales of the farm produce as equity fund to empower the trainees to set up their own enterprise. All the UAC -RUFS trainees are formed into UAC Farmers’ Cooperative and we are committed to exploring every legally possible avenue to get them empowered. UAC is also appealing to other individuals and relevant organizations to come to our aid to deepen the empowerment scheme.
The time for hand-outs has passed and investment by the youths in their future signals the sustainable means of job creations. We cannot continue to wait for government to create all the jobs we need, youths cannot continue to remain on the street of jobless as graduates of an un productive education system.
