Perceptions and perspectives of tertiary students on Liberia’s agribusiness sector

Abstract

This article assesses Liberian tertiary students’ perception and perspectives on Liberia’s agribusiness sector; the assessment was conducted across nine universities in six counties and targeted young people aged 15-35 as principal respondents. The research employed a survey with a sample size of 1,701 university students. Overall, tertiary students had a positive perspective of the agribusiness sector. Specifically, young people perceived agribusiness to be profitable and a viable venture to engage in (with a median of 2.57 of a perception scale of 1(least profitable) to 3 (most profitable)). Even though young people in Liberia had a positive perspective of the agribusiness sector (with a median of 3.80 of a perception scale of 1(strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree)), they agreed that young people in Liberia faced many constraints to their involvement in agribusiness (with a median of 4 of a perception scale of 1(strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). The concept of agribusiness was not well ingrained in the minds of young people in Liberia as they largely perceived agribusiness to be mainly farming. There should be education on agribusiness, where the input, production (farming), processing, distribution and agri-support sectors are holistically referred to as agribusiness.

Keywords

• Perception on agricultural business
• young people in Liberia
• youth development
• literate’s perception on farming
• viewpoint of the agricultural sector
• youth in Africa