Agriculture is the primary source of income for many rural populations in Africa, but keeping youth involved in the sector is a major challenge. Training opportunities are often limited, and income is inconsistent across the seasonality of many crops.
As a result, many rural youth engage in a plethora of economic activities to support themselves, ranging from formal agricultural production to informal cash-paid labor. A recent year-long study by The MasterCard Foundation has shone some light on the diverse economic lives of rural youth in Ghana and Uganda. These findings could provide development program designers with new insight into how to design capacity-building programs that are immediately relevant to youth.
To construct the report Invisible Lives, researchers asked families to keep financial diaries to record financial flows. Surveyors then conducted bi-weekly visits with families asking a specific list of questions regarding expenses, income, savings, and economic behavior in general. These diaries provided information about behavioral changes throughout different periods of the year, as well as insight into how income fluctuates.