New research on agrifood employment across Africa and Asia shows that youth engagement in farming is stronger than commonly assumed, and that bundled investments, appropriate mechanisation, and upskilling programmes can generate better jobs across the sector. Realising this potential will require stronger labour data, clearer evidence on sustainable intensification, and greater attention to the employment effects of digitalisation and AI.
The developing world stands at a pivotal moment. In the next decade, more than a billion young people will reach working age, many searching for employment opportunities. However, hundreds of millions of workers continue to earn too little to escape poverty. Without the creation of sufficient good jobs, the opportunity to transform this growing working-age population into a demographic dividend and achieve significant poverty reduction may be lost.
Central to the jobs challenge is the agrifood system. It employs about one in three workers globally, rising to two-thirds in low-income countries, albeit mostly in semi-subsistence, low-productive farming. Overall, farming still accounts for most agrifood employment, but value chains are increasingly shifting workers into higher-paying agrifood processing, trading, and food services. With food demand rising (OECD/FAO 2025), diets diversifying, and convenience becoming more important, these value chains have the potential to generate millions of better jobs, both on and off the farm.
Significant questions remain, however, about how best to leverage this rising and diversifying food demand into productive employment. Agricultural policies have traditionally focused on raising aggregate output and yields, rather than labour productivity and job outcomes. Producers must also generate more output with less strain on the environment and greater resilience to climate pressures. Policy lessons from past successes and failures may no longer apply, and the current boom in disruptive technologies brings new opportunities. New research offers valuable insights, centred around five themes.
The peculiarities of agrifood jobs
Despite their importance, our understanding of jobs in the agrifood sector remains surprisingly limited. These jobs often involve work as business owners rather than simply as farm workers; they generate highly variable returns in the form of output that is often only partly sold on the market, and they are also seasonal – implying that household members are idle during part of the year when alternative off-farm employment opportunities are absent.
New findings further dispute the notion that young people in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria are leaving agriculture faster than previous generations (Abay et al. 2025). They show that their involvement in agriculture increases as governments invest in the sector (Amare et al. 2025). These findings challenge the common perception that youth are uninterested in farming, even when it is profitable. Estimates of demand for bundled spraying services in Nigeria highlight the potential for youth employment generation in agri-MSMEs.
To better understand and respond to the real needs of farmers and agribusinesses, policymakers need a clearer picture of who works where, in what roles, and under what conditions. This requires systematically mapping job types – from subsistence to full-time work – assessing productivity and earnings, and tracking how employment evolves as economies develop. It also requires stronger agrifood labour data, especially on working conditions and jobs in micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) (Meemken et al. 2024).
Bundling and scaling
Producing more food and bringing it to consumers requires investments in rural infrastructure, clear rules and predictable policies, and risk-sharing measures to attract private investment in farming and agribusiness. But how should interventions be bundled and sequenced, and which types of farmers and agribusiness organisations could scale things up?
Research on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) shows that combining extension and input support for smallholder farmers with rural road rehabilitation can raise their incomes (Nardi et al. 2025). By contrast, simulation results from Ethiopia suggest that investing in agri-MSMEs (as opposed to smallholder farmers) is a more cost-effective way to do so (Aragie et al. 2025).
In Kenya, labour is more productive in medium sized farms (4 ha on average) (Muyanga et al. 2025). However, there is no evidence that these farms generate positive spillovers on the welfare of neighbouring smallholders. Last mile agents, who connect farmers with input service providers and aggregators, hold promise (Keenan et al. 2025). Researchers and policymakers need more evidence on how to combine, sequence, and scale interventions to expand productive employment, including on the role of productive alliances (World Bank 2025), as in Latin America, and the potential and limitations of spontaneous clusters (Reardon et al. 2024).
Leveraging technology
Mechanisation and automation help increase labour productivity and incomes, benefiting farmers and farm workers, as highlighted in a keynote presentation (Daum 2025). Whether they also displace workers in the short run depends on the context. When they relieve seasonal labour bottlenecks and enable farm expansion or intensification, they can generate new wage employment.
Tasks that require fine motor skills, such as harvesting horticulture, milking, and meat processing, are traditionally more labour-intensive. These subsectors also hold most potential for job growth, although in more advanced economies, these jobs are increasingly automated, substituting for international migrant labour.
A research priority will be to identify policies that enable smallholder farmers to capture economies of scale from lumpy machinery investment, for example through scale-appropriate mechanisation (e.g. two-wheel tractors) and machinery services (Daum et al. 2023). The job implications of digitally and AI-enabled agriculture, which can reduce the costs of bringing information, finance, and markets within the reach of smallholders, also require further exploration (Keenan et al. 2024).
Making sustainable intensification a win-win strategy
Environmental degradation and climate change make it essential to boost output while using less land and water and preserving soil health. This approach, known as ‘sustainable intensification’, can come with upfront costs, a steep learning curve, delayed gains, and uncertain job impacts.
Experiences from seven African countries show that sustainable intensification is often associated with lower net returns to family labour because the extra work is not offset by higher returns to land, at least not in the short run (Benali et al. 2025). Yet the findings on groundnuts from West Africa suggest higher labour productivity from sustainable intensification, implying that context matters (Tabe-Ojong 2025).
The technology suitability index developed by researchers in India helps to better match the attributes of specific sustainable intensification technologies to what farmers actually need, such as saving time, reducing hard manual work, or increasing autonomy (Bora et al. 2025). Overall, more evidence is needed on how sustainable intensification practices affect labour outcomes across crops, settings, and time periods, and on how to foster adoption and productive job creation.
Upskilling the agrifood workforce
To operate effectively in today’s rapidly changing world, agrifood workers need upskilling. Market orientation is growing, digitisation is accelerating, and the need for sustainable intensification is becoming more pressing. Evidence on upskilling agrifood-hospitality workers in Kenya outlines a practical method for assessing the gap between the skills needed and those taught (Nyenyi 2025).
It also assesses the potential of an alternative dual training programme that links classroom learning with on-the-job experience and placement. Participants improved their technical and soft skills, demonstrated greater food safety compliance, and earned higher salaries. Expanding this type of research would help pinpoint skill gaps both on and off the farm and guide targeted training responses.
Next steps
These new findings illustrate how a focus on labour outcomes in the agrifood sector highlights neglected issues such as the peculiarities of agrifood jobs and the need for skilling, reframes long-standing debates on organisational models and mechanisation, and raises new questions about the labour effects of digitalisation and sustainable intensification. How best to leverage the agrifood system for jobs presents an important new knowledge agenda for policy think tanks and academia across the globe.
Authors' note: Papers were presented at an ANAPRI-World Bank conference in Kigali (November 2025).
References
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