In Nigeria, unemployment remains a stubborn reality for many young people. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported youth unemployment at 8.4% in Q1 2024 and 6.5% in Q2 2024, while the youth not in education, employment or training rate, stood at 14.4% in Q1 2024 and labour underutilisation (LU2) was 13.0% in Q2 2024.
These figures indicate that a large number of young Nigerians are still outside stable employment, yet agriculture, the sector that could absorb many of them, continues to struggle with youth participation.
One of the strongest barriers discouraging young people from farming is land access. Experience on youth-land access in Sub-Saharan Africa shows that land remains a major obstacle to youth participation in agriculture, and that it is a false impression that young people simply “hate” farming.
The International Fund for Agriculture and Development (IFAD) stated that Nigerian youths face limited access to land, financial resources, business knowledge, and networks. In practice, meaning that many young people, who may be willing to farm, do not have the basic productive assets needed to begin.
Funding is another major constraint. In a Nigerian youth survey reported by BusinessDay, 52% of respondents said they needed access to funding, far more than those who mentioned mentoring, market access, or land. A separate Nigerian study on youth rice farmers found that only a few had access to credit overall, and just a tiny fraction of youths, intensively involved in agriculture, had credit access.
When a sector depends so heavily on capital for seedlings, fertiliser, irrigation, transport, and labour, this lack of finance makes farming ‘feel’ risky and inaccessible to many youths.
Stigma also plays a quiet, but powerful role. Many young people appear to hold a negative perception of farming, seeing it as work for the old, poor, rural, uneducated or unskilled, and even as an occupation of last resort with little financial reward. That kind of social perception matters because young people often choose careers, not only on the basis of profit, but also on status, identity, and peer approval.
Therefore, when farming is framed as a failure instead of enterprise, it becomes harder to attract ambitious youth into the sector.
