In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), entrepreneurship in the agriculture sector remains for youth a key pillar for income creation. However, few are attracted by agribusiness despite stakeholders’ efforts toward engaging youth in agriculture. Therefore, this study examines the relationship between entrepreneurial potential characteristics and youth desirability to start an enterprise in agriculture among 514 young people in Eastern DRC. This study revealed that youth in South Kivu have different entrepreneurship potential features and agribusiness desirability levels according to their gender and living area. Hence, the youth’s agribusiness desirability is motivated by an awareness of emerging agripreneurial activities, land ownership, parent involvement in farming activities as a role model, perceived agribusiness as an employment source, management-organizing and opportunistic competencies, market analysis, negotiating, and planning skills. Therefore, efforts to attract youth into agribusiness should focus on the use of media, the creation of awareness of available agribusiness initiatives in their area, and the setup of land policy. This is in addition to putting in place capacity-building programs on entrepreneurial and business skills through incubators, and the formalization of youth agribusiness groups that foster capitalizing experiences between new and accelerated agripreneurial enterprises, with the support of parents and financial institutions, focusing on gender sensitivity, in both rural and urban areas.
All stakeholders, especially households that depend on agriculture, must come up with every avenue available to improve farm productivity in order to raise yields due to the constraints posed by climate change on food production systems. Sufficient increments in yields will address the challenges of food insecurity and malnutrition among vulnerable households, especially smallholder ones. Yield increases can be achieved sustainably through the deployment of various Climate Smart Integrated Pest Management (CS-IPM) practices, including good agronomic practices. Therefore, CS-IPM practices could be essential in ensuring better household welfare, including food security and nutrition. With such impact empirically documented, appropriate policy guidance can be realized in favor of CS-IPM practices at scale, thus helping to achieve sustainable food security and food systems. However, to this end, there is yet limited evidence on the real impact of CS-IPM practices on the various core social welfare household parameters, for instance, food security, household incomes, gender roles, and nutrition, among others. We contribute to this body of literature in this paper by reviewing various empirical evidence that analyzes the impact of respective CS-IPM practices on key social welfare aspects of smallholder farm households in developing countries around the world. The review finds that CS-IPM practices do increase households’ adaptation to climate change, thus enhancing soil and crop productivity, thereby ensuring food and nutrition security, as well as increasing market participation of CS-IPM adopters, thus leading to increased household incomes, asset accumulation, and subsequently better household food and nutrition security via direct own-farm produce consumption and market purchases using income. CS-IPM practices also enhance access to climate-related information, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, conserve biodiversity, and enhance dietary diversity through improved crop and livestock varieties and also reduce variable farm production costs. Therefore, there would be multiple welfare gains if CS-IPM practices were scaled up.
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