The Youth Agro Environmental initiative started as a blog that was created during YoBloCo Awards (Youth in Agriculture Blog Competition) organised by the ARDYIS project of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in 2011. "The YoBloCo awards pushed me to start blogging and to this day I remain an avid blogger. In fact, I’m no longer the only contributor to the blog.  An agriculture professional with lots of experience in the field was so impressed by what we were doing that she offered to be a regular contributor on the blog", says Ms. Grace Wanene, the founder of the Youth Agro Environmental initiative.

Grace started the blog to share information and advice on agricultural, environmental and youth issues. Some of the popular posts that one can find on the blog are on the production of mushroom, strawberries, broiler, potato, passion fruit and many other agricultural commodities. What is very interesting about the articles she writes is that they are focused on how to produce these crops or livestock, with details on the agricultural practices and also adding a business perspective to them by giving examples of business plans. 

The Youth Agro Environmental initiative was the runner-up in the individual category of the YoBloCo Awards.  Grace did not stop her blogging activity after the competition. She upgraded the blog, added more features, allowing her to have feedback from her audience which includes other finalists that she met during the prize giving ceremony in South Africa. She also started to provide consultancy services on agriculture through the blog.

Today, apart from being just an online information sharing platform, the Youth Agro Environmental initiative is also offering trainings to young people on how to grow different crops in Kenya and start up an agri-business. “Currently we are holding trainings on strawberry and sweet yellow passion fruit but we will soon introduce mushroom farming and other crops gradually. We also have a question and answer service where we answer questions from farmers by email. We get between 5 and 10 questions daily”.

Winning the Global Innovation Awards is a great achievement for the team and this is another success story showing how the use of ICTs are creating opportunities for youth in Agriculture. 

The Blog of the Youth Agro Environmental initiative can be accessed on this link: http://yagrein.blogspot.nl/

The ARDYIS project warmly congratulates Grace for this outstanding achievement!

The Awards at the Connected Kenya 2013 were sponsored by Google, with winners getting mentorship from the firm, Samsung Galaxy Tab 8 tablets, online ad spend vouchers and Google App subscriptions. The top two winners get a Nexus Q and a Pixel laptop in addition.