CTA Strengthening Youth Engagement in Agriculture

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BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Nov 04 2015, CNS – The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) is raising the capacity and opportunities of youth in agriculture in Africa, Caribbean and the Pacific through the use of Information Communication Technology (ICTs).

Through its Agriculture Rural Development Youth ICTs (ARDYIS) Progamme, CTA has engaged the services of 15 young people to carry out social media reporting from the Caribbean and Pacific Agri-Food Forum currently underway here.

“We trained them on Oct 31 and Nov 01 to have the different tooling capacity to be able to report and to cover this event. Since Nov 02 they have been covering the event so they are publishing blog posts, they are publishing twitter posts etc.,” CTA’s Programme Coordinator ICT for Agriculture, Ken Lohento said.

“We are very, very impressed by what we have been able to reach. They have published about 3000 posts through Facebook or Twitter and have been able to reach about 400,000 potential users of those tools. This shows that those young people have been really promoting agriculture on social media.”

Out of the 15 youths, 10 were drawn from the Caribbean region. At the end of the forum, the social reporters will be awarded a certificate.