Mary Mueni did not grow up wanting to be a farmer.

Image Caption: Mary Mueni on the poultry farm she built from the ground up in Makueni County, Kenya.

But in 2023, she attended a training in Makueni County, Kenya, under CABI's PlantwisePlus Programme. She went home, looked at what she had, small space, little money, and made a choice. She started with poultry.

Today she raises Kienyeji chickens and rabbits. She even figured out how to cut her feed costs using Azolla, a small water plant she learned about at the training. She did not wait for anyone to solve her problems. She used what she learned and built something real.

I asked her what she would tell young people starting out in farming. She said:

Image Caption: Mary Mueni at a CABI PlantwisePlus Programme agribusiness training in Makueni County, Kenya.

"Have a plan. Keep records. Know your numbers. Treat agriculture as a business, not a tradition." — Mary Mueni

But Mary did not get here alone. Behind her was a village.

Image Caption: Linda Likoko (fourth from left) and Deogratius J. Magero (far right) with a group of young agripreneurs who are now trainers and peer mentors. From left to right: Kelvin Musyoki, Wanza Simon, Gertrude Wavinya, Linda Likoko, Mary Mueni, Mirriam Mutua and Deogratius J. Magero.

That village started with Linda Likoko, Projects Support Officer at CABI Kenya. Linda is the person on the ground. She organises the trainings, connects the young people, and makes sure the programme reaches the communities that need it most. When I arrived in Wote, Makueni County in the eastern part of Kenya, in November 2025, the trust in that room did not come from nowhere. Linda had built it.

I was there representing my communications and learning startup, NextGen Agri Voices, a platform based in Ethiopia that tells stories of agricultural change across Africa. I came to see what good youth agribusiness training looks like in real life. What I found surprised me.

The people teaching at the front of the room were not CABI staff. They were former trainees. Young people who went through the same programme, established their own agricultural enterprises, and came back to teach the next group from their own experience. Mary was one of them. Not a student anymore. Her story was the lesson.

This is the village that Deogratius J. Magero, the former Youth Engagement Manager at CABI Kenya, has been quietly building. He understands something many people miss. Young people do not just need information. They need to see themselves in the person teaching them. When a former trainee stands at the front of the room, something shifts. It stops feeling like a programme and starts feeling like a path.

He said it simply during the training:

"The biggest mistake young agripreneurs make is treating agriculture like a gamble rather than a plan. You put seeds in the ground and hope. But hope is not a business model. Knowledge, practice, patience, and learning are."

Mary is the story. But Linda and Deogratius are the reason the story exists. That is what a village does. It does not just teach you what to do. It shows you who you can become.

Image Caption: Meron Sileshi (fifth from left), founder of NextGen Agri Voices, with the CABI team and the youth trainers in Wote, Makueni County, Kenya.

Stories like Mary's matter precisely because of who needs to hear them. Young people across Africa are making decisions right now about whether farming is worth their time and their energy. They are waiting for someone who looks like them, who started where they started, to show them what is possible. That is why I started NextGen Agri Voices.

Image Caption: Meron Sileshi, founder of NextGen Agri Voices, at the African Food Systems Forum in Dakar, Senegal in September 2025, capturing the voices of African youth in agriculture.

I believe that a well-told story does something no training manual can. My goal is to collect and amplify these voices from across the continent, thus why I have been attending agrifood system forums and conferences all over Africa the past year so that a young person in Ethiopia, in Nigeria, in Zambia, can look at Mary’s story from Kenya and see themselves. Through Toastmasters, I have come to understand that storytelling is not just a skill. It is a tool to create influence. When African youth in the agriculture sector learn to tell their stories with clarity and confidence, they inspire change. NextGen Agri Voices was born from that same belief. Every story we tell is a seed. The impact we intend to grow is a generation of young agripreneurs who know they are not alone, and who know that their village, like Mary's, is something that can be built.