Across Africa's arid and semi-arid landscapes — from the Sahel to the Horn to the Kalahari — millions of young people in pastoral and dryland communities are underserved by youth programming. These are communities that have stewarded some of the continent's most ecologically complex territories for generations: grasslands, shrublands, and rangelands that together cover more than half of Africa's land surface and support the livelihoods of over 300 million people. Yet structured youth development has rarely followed them there.
ACN's Strategic Plan names dryland and ASAL communities as a Phase 1 priority from Year 1, aligned with the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists 2026. Pillar III (Climate & Environment) and Pillar I (Agriculture & Food Systems) have specific programming tracks for pastoral and dryland contexts — but 2026 demands that we move across all six pillars simultaneously, bringing the full depth of 4-H's Positive Youth Development approach to communities that have long been excluded from it.
In Agriculture & Food Systems, young pastoralists will engage with indigenous livestock management practices alongside modern veterinary knowledge, beekeeping enterprises adapted to dryland flora, and farmer-managed natural regeneration — FMNR — initiatives that have transformed degraded lands across the Sahel and are now spreading eastward. In Climate & Environment, ACN member programmes will develop youth-led rangeland monitoring systems, engage young people in community-level adaptation planning, and equip emerging leaders to access climate finance mechanisms, including the Africa Climate Change Fund and national adaptation funds, on behalf of their communities.
Science, Technology, and Innovation programming will bring remote-sensing literacy to young pastoralists — helping communities map grazing routes, track vegetation cover, and document land rights using tools that were, until recently, inaccessible to them. Health & Wellbeing programming will address the disproportionate burden carried by young people — and young women in particular — in pastoral economies: the livestock losses to disease, the distance from health services, the acute vulnerability to climate shocks.
Across Civic Engagement and Leadership, ACN will support young pastoralists and rangeland community members to engage with land governance processes, tenure rights frameworks, and the inter-governmental negotiations that shape the policies governing their lives.
The International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists is a political moment as much as a programmatic one. ACN intends to use it as both — partnering with governments, FAO, IFAD, indigenous peoples' organisations, and civil society to ensure that the young people who inherit Africa's drylands are not only surviving them, but shaping their future.
