The Africa Projects Development Centre Ltd (APDC), is an Africa-wide, for profit organisation with its Headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria, and Liaison office in London, UK. It was established to deliver on two core mandates; 1. Youths Incubation & Training as strategy for social security to create jobs and wealth in agripreneurship; and 2. Project Development & Management, conducting general consultancy, and building the capacity of development professionals in all sectors. APDC is experienced in incubation, teaching, coaching and mentoring young African Agripreneurs. The Centre aims to enhance the effectiveness of development interventions in Africa through nurturing creative ideas that effectively address the development, policy and programmes problems confronting policy makers and implementers on the continent.

The context for focusing on youth, and especially those in the cities is as follows: we have ageing farming population of average age of 60 years which is unsustainable for the future of agriculture on the African continent if we were to achieve food self-sufficiency by 2025; as youth graduate from the universities, most of them drift to the cities in search of often elusive jobs, and on finding none, get stuck in the cities without any functional means of livelihoods which exacerbates urban poverty; and available city lands for farming are becoming increasingly limited. APDC has decided to support young graduates already in the cities by incubating them and training them to take up urban farming as a business, and facilitating access for them to inclusive financing. When these youths achieve success, they will seek to expand and will automatically return to the rural areas from where they had earlier emigrated. They will employ more young people and help boost food security. Agribusiness demonstration facilities available are screen houses for horticulture (hydroponics and pot system), aquaculture, poultry (broilers and layers), mushrooms, snailery and capacity building in their value chains.

The Creative youth incubation training enterprise is to support our concept of urban and peri-urban agribusiness value chain. The fashionistas enterprise has been established to educate, empower, employ and engage youth, most especially women (skilled and unskilled) in Africa, who may not find interest in any of the direct agricultural value chains. This opportunity we believe would benefit incubatee at the Centre, create employment from our expansion, and also contribute to wealth of innovations for youth in Africa. It will cover creative exploits in fashion designing and their accessories like, clothes making, bead making, gele tying, bag making, hair braids, leather works etc.

The Centre offers specialized services in the areas of economic research, project design, project appraisal, economic and financial appraisal, policy and project analysis, monitoring and evaluation, agribusiness, agricultural development, climate smart agriculture, value chain analysis, financial management, investment analysis, and monitoring and evaluation. These services are offered by a support team of highly qualified, competent and hardworking professionals and consultants mainly drawn from national and international experts, especially with experience in international development finance institutions, with a renewed sense of enthusiasm to go beyond the ordinary to provide excellent consultancy/research and capacity building services in Africa.

Put together, the Projects Development and Partnership, and the Youth Agriprenuership and Creative Incubation and Training Departments of APDC work in synergy to achieve the primary objective of contributing to Africa’s development.