Launching Global YPARD Café: call for project proposals

Young Professionals for Agricultural Development (YPARD) is organizing the first-ever Global YPARD Café from the 16th to 30th of November 2020. The YPARD Café within the YPARD Country Chapters has been a platform for discourse by Young Professionals on key youth issues in sustainable food systems. This has been an engagement, which highlights youth’s perspectives on the issues as well as the bottlenecks of youth’s contribution to sustainable food systems within the countries and the way forward.

Across the globe, the progressively changing times in the wake of the COVID-19 situation have compounded the challenges facing youth engagement in agriculture. It is against this background that YPARD seeks to hold the global forum dubbed the Global YPARD Café: Youth Engagement in Agribusiness Post-Covid 19. This is aimed at informing the focus of youth engagement in contemporary times through fostering interaction between youth and experts in agriculture and agribusiness about opportunities for enhancing youth employability and contributions to socio-economic recovery. Additionally, the café offers opportunities for young professionals to highlight emerging innovations within the intersection of income-generation opportunities and sustainable food systems, which can enable needed post-covid 19 recoveries in our society

Objectives and outputs:

The objective of the Global YPARD Café is to bring together Young Professionals and experts on youth engagement within the YPARD country chapters across the globe to dialogue on issues of youth interest agricultural interest. This is to position the youth themselves as influencers in the strategic direction of youth engagement in sustainable systems within the countries, in the region and on the continent at large. 

The Global YPARD Café will result in the following:  

• Strengthen linkages and collaboration between local institutions and stakeholders of youth engagement in sustainable food systems,
• Identification of policy-relevant advice to enable the scaling up of innovative employment opportunities in sustainable food systems value chain and
• Highlight and promote best practices in agribusiness and other youth employment opportunities.

The expected outputs of the Global YPARD Café are:

• Blog posts from the proceedings of each event (identifying innovative youth employment opportunities in the country, approaches to scale up innovative youth employment opportunities and key policy advises to strengthen covid-19 recovery through youth employment)
• Live commentaries of the Café (someone live-tweeting using the country chapter/YPARD media channel)
• Regional synthesis as a regional report on the proceedings of the events- also showcasing some success stories of young agricultural leaders featured on the events. This will later inform the development of a global knowledge product
• Increased engagement on Country Chapter media pages
• (Increase in the number of country-based Social media pages/ members registered with YPARD).

The YPARD Global Café is open to discussions on themes related to:  

• Existing and innovative youth employment opportunities including agribusiness approaches and related challenges, opportunities for scaling up and relevant policy advise. agribusiness approaches and related challenges/ opportunities
• Improvement of youth employability and skills for different forms of engagement and income-generation in the sustainable food systems value chain.

Participants of the Global YPARD Café are: 

1. members of the YPARD network on the country levels
2. partner youth networks and actors in the agricultural sector
3. youth-focused organizations or networks

Expectations from participating Country Chapters:

Participating country chapters will be selected through a competitive process.

Each Country Chapters’ working group is to draft a proposal based on their chosen theme for discussion concerning the theme. The events (can be in the forms of workshops, discussions, exhibitions or E-forums/online discussions depending on the prevailing circumstances associated with physical meetings in the chapter due to the Covid 19 pandemic) should showcase active and inspirational Young Professionals involved in sustainable food systems in the context of the forum.

The proposal should include a comprehensive concept note and budget (not more than 2-3 pages). The following will be expected through this activity:

• Social media engagement of members of the country chapter via the chapters’ social media channels
• A blog post on the country-based YPARD Café to be submitted to the Global and corresponding Regional Coordinating Units.
• The online café should run within a maximum of 2 hours within two weeks from 16th to 30th November 2020.

Support from the Global Coordinating Unit:

• Each selected proposal may be supported up to an amount of USD 1,000 which will be transferred through the Regional Coordinating Units.
• A social media kit will be shared to help promote this global activity on all of YPARD’s social media channels. Users of this kit (Country Representatives, Communications Focal Persons, Working Group Members, etc.) are permitted to edit this to suit their audience.

Country Representatives are encouraged to send in their applications and proposals to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for review and selection from the 13th of October 2020 to 11:59 midnight CET on the 23rd of October 2020 with all applications and proposals including their team list (and their contacts).