An additional 300,000 youth enter the labor market every year, and this number set to increase to 500,000 by 2025, yet only around 6% of these workers will have reached the level of tertiary or vocational education. Not only does this block them from accessing formal employment opportunities, but inadequately trained staff leads to a drop in employers’ efficiency – with many firms are forced to recruit from Maputo or neighboring Zimbabwe, at great cost and difficulty, and ultimately to the detriment of local job seekers.

Our private sector partners all describe a lack of specific, practical job skills for specific tasks  like tractor operation and maintenance, functional IT skills, and boom sprayer calibration. They asked us for short, skills based, affordable trainings for rapid up-skilling. In response, we established our own training institution, the Manica Agribusiness Center or MAC. The MAC partnered with private sector providers of goods and services to co-design and run courses like training in tractor operations and repair with Lonagro Mozambique (John Deere representatives), crop nutrition (Yara Fertilizers), integrated pest management (Bayer), SMETA and Global GAP certification for export standards (AAU Technical). Uniquely, the MAC’s courses were all short (less than one week) and practical, held in MAC’s “practical classroom” (workshops and its 20-hectare Model Farm). Through demonstrations and field days, the MAC became a meeting point of reference for the Manica agribusiness community.