AZ Youth Empowerment Model
The Uganda National Household Survey (UNHS) 2019/2020 reports a total of 19% youth aged 18-30 years of Uganda’s total population of 40.9million. Of these youth 51.9% are employed and agriculture provides 46.6% of the employment opportunities.
At aXiom Zorn we believe in the empowerment of youth along the agricultural value chains regardless of where they live, their level of education, physical abilities among other factors that downplay their absorption into the agriculture sector.
Recruiting the youth into Agriculture to derive a livelihood still comes with a lot challenges given the stereotype and mindset that portrays youth evolvement in Agriculture as a last resort and the inadequate guidance on how the youth can exploit the opportunities along agriculture value chains.
At aXiom Zorn we engage the youth as our grassroot taskforce and introduce them to other opportunities beside the physical farming within the agricultural value chain, where they support as last mile linkage to the farming community providing key three services;
- Providing data collection services among the rural communities to facilitate linkages for our financial inclusion projects and other development projects.
- Offering market linkages with all agricultural products such as marketing insurance and benefiting from commission, linking produce buyers and input seller with the broader rural community who struggle to get the providers of such services
- Provide support services by trainings the youth to extend ICT knowledge to farmers such as the use of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to access information, use of messages (SMS) and unstructured supplementary Service Data (USSD) as a means of supporting the use and adoption of technology to improve productivity.
.
aXiom Zorn currently has a netwrok of over 700 agents across the regions of uganda providing data collection lastmile services as stated earlier.
The key requirement for the youth to be part of the the netwwork include having a smartphone that can support the platforms, and digital tools for the youth to provide lastmile connection witht the community, a good reputation and discpline acknowledged by the community, and basic comprehension of the English language.
The agents grow their networks based on the needs of the different projects i.e., extend their knowledge to fellow youth to provide support services for the community. As such each agent who directly reports to aXiom Zorn builds a network of about six or more like minded youth to exploit the opportunities that aXiom Zorn builds in it’s data service offering and projects with within the different partnerships created.
aXiom Zorn pays out commission and retainers for each of the services that the agents are able to extend to the community and the projects engaged in.
aXiom Zorn further plays the role of encouraging the youth to actively involved in Agriculture production by supporting their need in accessing financial support from the financial service providers and equipping them with knowledge on enterprise management.