Can Agricultural Value Chain Programs Help Rural Youth Increase their Income? Short- and Medium-term Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Kenya

In Sub-Saharan Africa, off-farm employment opportunities in agri-food systems are rapidly increasing, yet young people in rural areas continue to be plagued by high levels of underemployment. To combat this issue, policymakers have started encouraging rural youth to undertake entrepreneurial opportunities along agricultural value chains. But there is scant evidence on the effectiveness of these types of programs to generate economic benefits for rural youth. The current study provides insight on this issue by evaluating a randomized control trial in Eastern Kenya where rural youth were trained in business concepts and linked with agricultural input suppliers to become resellers of post-harvest inputs to smallholder farmers. We found that after one season the intervention generated large increases in income on average. However, quantile regressions revealed that these large impacts disproportionately accrued to youth at the top of the income distribution and failed to significantly generate income for the majority of youth in the treatment group. Disaggregating income sources further showed that these gains were most likely being driven by a crowding in of farming income relative to baseline. Marginal treatment effects also demonstrated that heterogeneity in varying levels of grit and age contributed to the gains in income.