Navigating existing barriers and future opportunities for youth entrepreneurship within the barley–livestock systems

This study examines opportunities and barriers to youth entrepreneurship within barley–livestock farming systems, focusing on young women’s and men’s engagement in agricultural innovations. It further analyzes how local definitions of youth and empowerment condition their ability to access resources, cooperatives, and credit, drawing on surveys, focus group discussions, and interviews across three regions. The study employed a mixed-methods design to capture both quantitative patterns and qualitative insights. Findings reveal that youth entrepreneurship prospects include to different degrees sheep breeding and fattening, crossbred poultry, crossbred cattle, ox fattening, improved barley, and food processing ventures. However, young people confront multiple constraints: high feed and input costs, limited veterinary services, land rental barriers, weak market linkages, climate shocks, and prohibitive credit conditions. Gendered exclusions are particularly evident: married women lose recognition as “youth,” restricting their access to youth cooperatives and financial services, while women entrepreneurs remain concentrated in labor-intensive and unsafe processing activities. Addressing these barriers requires policies and programs that (i) revise local youth definitions to ensure married but young women’s inclusion, (ii) expand affordable and gender-responsive/transformative credit, (iii) provide small-scale processing technologies to reduce labor burdens, (iv) strengthen feed, forage, and veterinary service delivery, and (v) improve market linkages with enterprises offering fair prices. By tackling these structural, institutional, and gendered barriers, Ethiopia can unlock the entrepreneurial potential of rural youth and foster more inclusive and sustainable agricultural development.