Youth leadership for agriculture (YLA) : end-of-activity evaluation

The purpose of the USAID/Feed the Future Uganda Youth Leadership for Agriculture activity (YLA) is to increase economic opportunities in agriculture-related fields for approximately 350,000 Ugandan female and male youth, aged 10 to 35, through building their entrepreneurship, leadership, and workforce readiness skills. 70 percent of participating youth were planned to be female. YLA set out to accomplish two major outcomes: (i) increasing incomes of youth working in agricultural value chains and (ii) improving skills and competencies of youth.

The purpose of the YLA evaluation was to provide USAID and its development partners with evidence and lessons learned on how to strengthen youth economic empowerment. Specifically, the evaluation set out to answer how YLA?s interventions contributed to youth?s economic empowerment in the agricultural sector. The evaluation also set out to identify enabling and hindering factors, along with unintended consequences.

The evaluation found rather strong evidence that YLA increased skills and incomes of young people. However, economic opportunities were mostly limited to farming activities, with few opportunities further down the value chain. The evaluation also found that gender constraints were not adequately addressed until the last year of implementation. The YLA?s adaptive management approach allowed staff to execute strategic pivots during its implementation to address lessons learned along the way, though the pivots mostly reflected the needs at the private-sector level.