IAKIB Cooperative has got 4004 members, among which 280 are still young. In 2017, the cooperative attended the youth workshop in 2017. There were several young farmers interested to join the cooperative, to motivate them the cooperative reduced the share value from 300 Euros to 50 Euros and made a payment in 5 installments possible. Between 2017-2018, 216 new young members joined the cooperative. After that, the next step was to organize the young members into youth committees, organized in zones (12 committees with one central committee at the cooperative level for coordination).
From 2018, we conducted different meetings to discuss which activities can be done to make the youth committees more involved. These were all about training and exchange: give youth opportunities to learn more about business development and creating business plans, organize field trips to learn from successful businesses, improve farming practices and additional topics like leadership
Several projects were realized:
Youth was also involved in reviewing and updating the membership base.
15 young members were involved in Livestock Farmer Field Schools conducted in 2019, young and old farmers were brought together to learn from each other.
26 youths who had education background in veterinary were connected to a dairy project called Rwanda Dairy Development Project to be trained in artificial insemination and they are certified as professionals to exercise AI as free lancers.
A business plan session was held in 2019, and young farmers were able to make draft business plans even though there is delay in finalizing despite several attempts to make follow up.
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