WHETHER it is about local purchasing of grain or other needs for refugee camps, and now increasingly being involved in recent government programmes in agriculture, the World Food Programme (WFP) is firmly embedded with what the government is doing on a routine basis.

Much the same applies to a number of other United Nations agencies and some multilateral organisations.

Various other agriculture stakeholders are also involved in implementing a wide range of projects, among them irrigation and crop experimentation.

What is interesting is the manner in which WFP is taking up a project meant to increase youth engagement in agriculture, giving it a captivating gender bias, including targeting its involvement with getting young women on board.

Yet there is a distinction in relation to the programme in which the agency is actively engaged and a more recent initiative apparently tailored more than a decade ago that was seemingly more gender inclusive.

‘Youth in Agribusiness’ is an initiative going as far back as the year 2008 and should already have appreciably turned things around for over 200,000 farmers at least in Arusha, Dodoma, Manyara, Shinyanga, Simiyu, Singida and Tabora regions –which is to suggest that the more recent drive is simply a booster.

The fact that WFP saw it fit to bring up this initiative in the now-ending 31st Agriculture (Farmers’ Day) Expo suggests that it isn’t a lesser issue in its schedule of work.

 A WFP official told visitors that the initiative was meant to assist farmers engaged in strategic crops named as sunflower, sorghum and beans.

There is a range of technical considerations explaining why the crops were selected, with nutrition and end-use forming part of those needs especially to WFP as likely to be a major customer for the produce.

Definitely, all issues arising in the recent initiative were noticed already in its precursor, the only difference being that the former programme was geared at elevating crop tonnage and form special groups of farmers in an inclusive manner.

The more recent drive has its focus on youth unemployment especially among graduates, seeking to help them have usable skills that can be improved and blend with an agricultural vocation. Here there is some experimentation on the youths, whereas earlier experimentation was on the crops.

Still, the two programmes aren’t just complementary in having involved youths in either instance or in directing considerable effort in uplifting agriculture, as there are more pertinent issues.

A comparison of the two programmes will show that the earlier programme is slow but sure and that it received perhaps modest allocations either locally or generally as project funding from abroad. Additionally, WFP still confidently talks of having brought on board more than 200,000 farmers.

Even with the more noticeable resources currently made available, the WFP programme design still poses a valid question for policy makers.

And this is none than whether the target should be specific crops or the youth as, with the latter, the range of trial and error widens dramatically – unlike in the case of pursuing crops.