Youth, women and rural development: agricultural policies to pave the way forward

Regional ENPARD South Seminar, 2016/10/06-07, Brussels (Belgium) Introductory note. ENPARD South initiative (European Commission); Rural youth and women remain vulnerable groups in the MENA region. Common vulnerability factors include low access to the needed capitals for economic and human development. Where they are possible, they remain essentially informal and precarious. Still, young people and women have specific advantages both for agriculture and the organization of development in rural areas. Young people are more and more numerous in the population of the MENA region. Agriculture remains their first source of employment even informal. Women have to assume more and more responsibilities in household works due to the migration of many heads of household related to economic reasons. In fact, the key blocking factors mostly remain cultural ones. At the policy level, little priority seems to be given to these trends: neither specific means, nor adapted policy is thought out or implemented to enable the youth and women to develop their participation in agricultural and rural development. Rural women and young people mostly find themselves in strategies that look for circumventing the constraints they face, which far from solving their difficulties, only reinforces their situation of vulnerability and precariousness and their marginalization of the formal economic system. In the middle term, this lack of interest will have serious consequences on the situation of rural areas and their agriculture, and even on the social stability in the region. The current socio‐political upheavals in the MENA region should all the more strongly encourage the public authorities to undertake reforms in favor of these social groups because youth and women are key resources to guarantee social and economic stability in the middle and long term.