Where we come from
In 2024, one thousand young people from across Africa met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the Thousand African Youth Summit on Food Systems and Agroecology. That summit created strong energy and new friendships. After it, young people started youth movements, festivals, training programmes, and policy work in their own countries.
To keep this energy alive, AFSA created the Youth and Agroecology Working Group. In April 2026, the group held its first planning meeting in Entebbe, Uganda. Sixteen youth leaders from ten countries came together for three days. They built a shared plan for the next five years. This website shares that work with you.
While AFSA brought together diverse movements committed to food sovereignty, youth voices were present but not meaningfully engaged and in 2019, during the Biennial Food Systems Conference in Saly, Senegal, a small group of young people from different member organisations came together and recognised this gap. They shared a common frustration around limited opportunities, rising unemployment, and the absence of spaces where young people could shape agroecology work. From this moment, the idea of a dedicated youth platform within AFSA was born.
The idea gained momentum in 2021 during AFSA’s Strategic Meeting and Annual General Meeting in Nairobi, where a larger group of youth convened to revive and strengthen the vision. They recognised that Africa’s youthful population is both a challenge and an opportunity. Faced with climate change, land access issues, and economic exclusion, they saw agroecology as a practical and political pathway for change. What emerged was not just a network, but a movement grounded in shared purpose, connecting young farmers, activists, and entrepreneurs across the continent.
Today, the AFSA Youth and Agroecology Working Group (YAWG) is a growing continental platform linking youth from over 100 organisations and initiatives across Africa. It creates space for young people to lead, organise, and contribute to transforming Africa’s food systems through agroecology. At its core, the YAWG is about shifting power, ensuring that young people are not only participants but drivers of solutions to food insecurity, climate challenges, and biodiversity loss, while shaping a future rooted in African knowledge, resilience, and sovereignty.
AFSA
The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is the continent’s largest civil society platform advocating for food sovereignty and agroecology. It brings together farmers’ organisations, indigenous peoples, pastoralists, faith-based institutions, women and youth movements, consumer networks and environmental groups. It is a true network of networks, comprising 48 member alliances active in 50 African countries and reaching over 200 million people. Founded in 2011 at COP17 in Durban, South Africa, AFSA stands as a unifying voice for African movements working to transform food systems, challenge industrial agriculture and defend community rights. Rooted in Africa’s rich heritage and wisdom, AFSA promotes African-led solutions that restore ecosystems, strengthen livelihoods and secure the continent’s right to define its own food future.
