Lesotho’s Young Agripreneurs Step Forward to Build a Sustainable Agrifood Future

In September 2025, ten young entrepreneurs gathered in Maseru for a week-long business incubation workshop designed to strengthen their enterprises and equip them to play a bigger role in transforming Lesotho’s agrifood systems. Organized under the FAO HASTEN project, the workshop brought together youth- and women-led businesses, with FAO experts and national and international coaches to focus on business growth strategies, sustainable practices, and practical ways to enhance their contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

HASTEN — Harnessing SDG-based Agrifood System Transformation through the Empowerment of the Next Generation of Agrifood Leadership in Africa — is an FAO project funded through the Flexible Voluntary Contribution (FVC), operating in Lesotho, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. It aims to put youth at the center of agrifood systems transformation. It does this by building skills in systems thinking to connect actions and impact across the SDGs, by bringing governments, businesses and academics around the same table for inclusive governance, and by supporting agripreneurship and youth empowerment through scaling eco-inclusive business models.

Within HASTEN, the business incubation programme is designed specifically for early-stage, youth- and women-led micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). It aims to helps them refine their business models, test new tools, and build the networks needed to scale and ultimately contribute to more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable agrifood systems.

A week of learning

©FAO Lesotho

The four-day training, facilitated by FAO and SEED, walked participants through the essentials of scaling their businesses while anchoring their work in sustainability. It began with value proposition and market analysis, helping participants clarify what they offer, who their customers are, and how to reach them. From there, they explored strategies to scale through partnership mapping, identifying growth scenarios and the actors needed to make them possible. This then turned into impact planning, where the businesses mapped their activities on a dashboard to track their impact across the SDGs. Using this tool the enterprises can monitor and report their impact along the social, environmental as well as the economic dimension of sustainable development. This was accompanied by a financing session that connected performance goals with financing strategies. Time was also dedicated to refining business models and polishing pitches for the participants to present their enterprises to stakeholders from government, academia, business development organizations and financial institutions.

Spotlight on the enterprises

The enterprises reflected the variety of ways Lesotho’s youth are shaping food systems:

©FAO Lesotho

From pitches to partnerships

©FAO Lesotho

The final day brought together representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, the National University of Lesotho, financial institutions including Standard Bank and Post Bank, and support organizations such as BEDCO. The enterprises delivered their pitches to the audience and joined in discussions centered on how to create a more enabling environment for agrifood MSMEs.

Together, the stakeholders endorsed an Expression of Intent recognizing youth- and women-led, eco-inclusive agrifood MSMEs as key drivers of innovation, food security and improved nutrition.

The Expression of Intent includes references to increase collaboration for:

• Supporting the meaningful participation and leadership of young and women entrepreneurs in agrifood systems transformation;
• Addressing systemic barriers and strengthening collaboration across stakeholders to unlock their full potential;
• Expanding equitable access to support services;
• Bridging gaps in financial and specialized services;
• Accelerating innovation and technology adoption.

As Ms. Malereko Aletta Molefi, National Food Systems Convenor of Lesotho, emphasized: “… the food system transformation we seek is also a generational promise. By empowering our youth as entrepreneurs, we invest not only in their future but also in the future of Lesotho. We invest in food systems that are productive, inclusive, resilient and sustainable.”

The Expression of Intent now provides a roadmap for how different actors can work together to ensure that promising enterprises like those incubated through the HASTEN programme are not left to grow in isolation but are supported as part of a national strategy for agrifood systems transformation.

What comes next

The Lesotho workshop was the first in a series. Rwanda and Sierra Leone will host their own national incubation workshops in the coming weeks, applying the same model: a blend of tailored enterprise coaching and structured engagement with national stakeholders. Stay tuned for updates here.

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