FF2018 Theme #everybodyeats

How do you make more young people interested in agriculture? This was our biggest question when we begin developing Fantasy Foodbowl.

The Kenya Youth in Agribusiness Strategy, was our initial drawing board, matching some objectives and outcomes with the National document. The strategy cites lack of interest and poor perception by the youth as the first challenge that is preventing more uptake. There are ten other issues, which at the time we felt were very technical or too complex to address. They still are.

So, we took up the mission to improve young people's perception towards agribusiness and then improved it from there. A couple of twists happened along the way:

• Just over 90% of the youth we interviewed already agreed that agribusiness is the way to go.

• 93% of them knew that one can make money from agribusiness and 70% of the said that if things are all-there, you can make 'good' money, not just something to get by.

• 50% of the youth felt their parents and guardians were doing it all wrong; but

• 80% said, if they could, their parents would let the improve their farming/production to get to agribiz levels - making money.

Our survey results, therefore, forced us to make a decision - do we go with trying to chance perception of the youth towards agriculture or do we agree that they already know it is a good thing - and then work from there?

It seemed that the many marketing and adocacy campaigns on making agriculture cool had done their work. We made the decision to 'work from there'.

So we did our second set of surveys, the two surveys targeted about 2,500 youth drawn from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Nigeria. The first set was set to help us understand the gap: what is preventing young people from getting into agribusiness. The second survey was build on the results from the first survey - call it cloud sourcing for solutions to fill the gap.

That's how we came up with the hashtag and our theme for 2018 #everybodyeats

Fantasy Foodbowl by its design brings together everything out there about agribusiness - in a way that all the users find value. By giving people something that matters to them, you are able to create meaningful engagement and #everybodyeats is one incredible and meaningful drive.

Moving one

FF2018 is not a one-time thing, or a campaign or an activity: it is like football, always on and always moving on. Therefore, we have designed a dynamic campaign for 2018 aimed at informing, including and driving people forward.

This is the path to achieving our marketing and promotional goals for 2018.