World Food Forum: #YouthLead Innovation Festival Takes a Youth-Led Approach to Transform Food Systems

On 13 August 2021 from 9:30 to 10:30 EST, the World Food Forum (WFF), in collaboration with the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth, the Food Systems Summit, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and Thought for Food, will host a youth-inclusive Food Security Session as part of the #YouthLead Innovation Festival.

The Food Security Session aims to engage, empower and give voice to young people as an integral and equal part of the process to shape the future of food security.

The session will open with a keynote speech from Máximo Torero, Chief Economist, and Youth Committee Chair at FAO. It will then highlight some of youth’s top concerns related to agri-food systems, based on the youth-led consultation that was hosted by the Food Systems Pre-Summit and WFF in July, and present youth-led solutions to food system challenges from young entrepreneurs around the world. Following the presentations, participants will reflect on some of the proposed solutions from WFF’s partner organization Extreme Tech Challenge. A multi-stakeholder discussion on the development and implementation of a youth-led approach to transform agri-food systems will follow.

The youth-initiatives highlighted during the session will be drawn from a shortlist of nominated enterprises that includes: Indigikitchen, an online cooking show dedicated to re-indigenizing our diets using digital media; Alley Capital Group, a young smart agriculture and engineering company offering crop protection services; Foodovation trading as Artisanal Foods, a food manufacturing company that specializes in the value addition of local ingredients in Zimbabwe; Spiral Farm House, a social enterprise in Nepal empowering local farmers to go fully organic; and Hillsbazar, an e-commerce platform promoting products from the hillsides of Bangladesh through innovative manufacturing, marketing and logistics.