Across Africa, a rapidly growing youth population presents both an urgent challenge and a transformative opportunity. Because agriculture remains a primary driver of employment across developing economies, unlocking the potential of the agrifood sector is critical to creating sustainable jobs, building agency, and improving livelihoods. To address this head-on, the Youth Agripreneur Hub (YAH) was established as an incubation platform to bridge evidence-based science with practical impact, leveraging data-driven insights and strategic partnerships to inform policy and catalyze youth entrepreneurship.

As the central incubator of this initiative, the Youth Agripreneur Accelerator (YAA) provides a dynamic, competitive venue to discover, train, and fund early-stage youth startups tackling real-world agrifood system challenges.

The launch of the YAA platform will take place during the "Youth, Jobs, and Voice in Africa's Agrifood System" conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (November 30 – December 1, 2026). Through a structured co-innovation process, pre-selected youth teams and individuals will collaborate to refine scalable agribusiness solutions designed to empower young people and drive inclusive growth. Top-performing ideas will receive $1,500 in startup funding to pilot their concepts, transitioning bold innovations from idea to impact and positioning young agripreneurs as drivers of resilient food systems.

 The Challenges (Problem Themes)

A.      Decent jobs through sustainable agriculture

Goal: Create real, paid employment for youth as part of Africa’s sustainable agriculture transition.

How? Build business models that turn agroecological, regenerative, or climate-smart practices into a source of decent jobs: input services, mechanization-as-a-service, advisory services, organic input production, or other ventures that generate paid work by offering farming services.

B.      Aggregation, smarter markets and resilient value chains

Goal: Support youth to capture more value across the value chain.

How? Develop digital, logistics, aggregation or service solutions that reduce post-harvest loss, connect producers to better markets, or improve supply chain efficiency with youth as service providers and entrepreneurs, not just labor. Youth as connectors within the agrifood systems (e.g. youth Agri-connect initiative) to fill critical gaps.

C.     Inclusive opportunities for young women, underserved youths and policy reforms

Goal: Open accessible entry points, policy reforms and decent jobs in agrifood value chains for young women and underserved rural youth. How? Design ventures that directly address gender gaps or the barriers facing rural and lower-resource youth finance, market access, skills, or pathways that move young people from informal to decent work. Policy innovations targeting recommendations for government policy reforms and repurposing subsidy programs with favorable options for youth.

D.     Skills-to-jobs bridges

Goal: Ensure that skills training for youth translates into a real job or income opportunity, not just a certificate.

How? Develop ventures that package training with a direct placement mechanism through employer linkages, apprenticeship-to-hire models, revenue-sharing service businesses, trade and networking platforms, and other models that close the gap between learning and earning. Strong ideas in this track move young people from skills acquisition to actual paid work, with the placement mechanism built into the business model rather than treated as an afterthought.

Application, Idea Submission, and Pre-selection

We are looking for young people with bold ideas and big bets to transform Africa’s agrifood system. Applicants can come from a wide range of backgrounds. Individuals or youth groups are eligible to submit start-up ideas.

Profiles we are looking for

•      Young entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs with an early-stage agrifood venture.

•      Students and recent graduates in agriculture, agribusiness, food science, technology, business, or related fields.

•      Technologists, data analysts, and developers with skills applicable to agrifood challenges.

•      Practitioners working in cooperatives, NGOs, extension services, or community organizations.

Eligibility criteria

•      Aged 18–35 at the time of application.

•      Based in Ethiopia, or applying with a clearly Ethiopia-focused idea

•      Sufficiently fluent in English to take part in mentoring sessions and pitch your idea on the day.

•      Applying as an individual or a group of not more than three (3) participants (Applicants retain the intellectual property (IP) rights to the ideas they submit).

How to apply?

The participants must submit a short-written application via the registration link at the top of this page.

The application should cover:

•      Your idea: the problem you are tackling, your proposed solution, and who would use it.

•      Business model basics: how the idea would generate revenue and, critically, how it would create jobs for youth.

•      Your team: who you are, your skills, and what each member would contribute.

•      Why this matters: why this idea is relevant for youth jobs in Ethiopia/Africa right now.

Places are limited. Pre-selection will be based on:

•      Relevance to youth jobs in Ethiopia’s agrifood system.

•      Novelty, a genuinely different approach, not a recycled model.

•      Feasibility, the team can plausibly execute with the right support.

•      Job-creation potential, a credible sense of how many and what kind of jobs the idea could generate.

•      Diversity, the cohort will reflect explicit balance across gender and regional representation.

Pre-selected teams will be invited to a virtual kickoff and 1 short virtual mentoring session in the weeks before the event, these are mandatory, not optional, since there is no in-person co-innovation day. Final pitches will be delivered live on 1 December 2026 in Ethiopia.

Process Structure: Pre-event Preparation and the Single Pitch Day

Pre-event preparation period (weeks before, mostly virtual)

Kickoff Call: Virtual session with all pre-selected teams: introduce mentors, share judging rubric and pitch-deck template, set expectations

Mentorship rounds (1 or 2): Short virtual check-ins per team with an assigned mentor, focused on sharpening the business model and job-creation argument, not building from scratch

Pitch-deck submission: Teams submit a capped slide deck (e.g., 8–10 slides) ahead of the event for judges to pre-read

Event day (Day 2, 1 Dec 2026) schedule

08:30 – 09:00 (30 min): Registration & welcome coffee
09:00 – 09:30 (30 min): Opening remarks & introduction of the jury
09:30 – 10:45 (75 min): Pitch session 1: 5 teams (10 min pitch + 5 min Q&A each)
10:45 – 11:15 (30 min): Coffee break
11:15 – 12:30 (75 min): Pitch session 2: 5 teams (10 min pitch + 5 min Q&A each)
12:30 – 14:00 (90 min): Lunch break (jury begins deliberation in parallel)
14:00 – 15:00 (60 min): Networking for participants / jury finalizes scoring
15:00 – 15:30 (30 min): Coffee break
15:30 – 16:30 (60 min): Awards ceremony & seed funding announcement
16:30 – 17:00 (30 min): Closing remarks & networking

Mentorship During the Pre-event Preparation Period

Mentor pool: mix of CGIAR scientists (for technical/scientific grounding), local entrepreneurs or alumni accelerator.

Structure: assign each team a primary mentor for the 1- 2 virtual check-ins described in Section 4.1, rather than conducting one-off visits on a rotating basis; continuity matters more than breadth when there is no in-person sprint to fall back on.

Light methodology: a simple shared template (problem statement, target user, business model canvas, basic cost/revenue sketch) keeps all teams comparable for judging and gives mentors a common reference point across virtual sessions.

Shark-Tank Pitch: Format and Judging

Pitch format

10-minute pitch, 5-minute Q&A per team; strict time enforcement.

Pitch deck: cap at a fixed number of slides (e.g., 8–10) submitted in advance so judges can review before the live session.

Judging panel

The judging panel will be composed by 1–2 CGIAR scientists, 1 representative from a funding/financial partner, 1 private-sector or investor representative, 1 government or policy representative (e.g., Ethiopia’s Job Creation Commission/Ministry of Labor, if engageable). A panel that mixes scientific credibility with funding authority signals that this is a real opportunity, not a symbolic exercise.

Scoring rubric

Criterion: Novelty / differentiation | Weight: 20% | What judges look for: Genuinely distinct from existing solutions in that space
Criterion: Feasibility | Weight: 20% | What judges look for: Realistic given team capability and likely resources
Criterion: Job-creation potential | Weight: 25% | What judges look for: Credible pathway to decent jobs for youth, with some sense of scale
Criterion: Inclusion (gender/region) | Weight: 15% | What judges look for: Explicit attention to who benefits and who is excluded
Criterion: Pitch quality and team | Weight: 20% | What judges look for: Clarity, command of the idea, ability to handle tough questions

Timeline

Early August 2026: Applications open
26th October 2026: Application deadline (12:00 noon EAT)
7th November 2026: Pre-selected teams notified
18th November 2026: Virtual kickoff and mentoring rounds
1 December 2026: Pitch Day in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, live shark-tank-style competition and award ceremony, during the Youth, Jobs, and Voice in Africa’s Agrifood System conference

Organizers and partners

The inaugural Youth Agripreneur Accelerator is organized as part of the Youth, Jobs, and Voice in Africa’s Agrifood System conference (30 November – 1 December 2026, Ethiopia), led by the CGIAR Policy Innovations Program and the CGIAR GENDER Accelerator, with partners including IFPRI, Alliance Bioversity–CIAT, CIMMYT, Ethiopian Policy Studies Institute and the World Bank.