Practical Guide for Rice Processing

The journey to entrepreneurship in its simplest form begins when a person acquires the mindset of being self-sustained and he or she decides to take concreate actions through creating a product, create a service platform or purchase a productive asset that is useful in providing a fee based service offering within a small community. A mindset is nothing more than a set of beliefs and assumptions that govern decision and actions. Given the level of unemployment common among youths in Nigeria and the need for inclusion of youth to participate in the rice value chain for enhanced food security and poverty reduction at the household levels, the concept of youth entrepreneurs trained under the Value Chain Development Programme (VCDP) in Kogi State was a bold step that help youth to acquire skills in rice processing. The initiative to train VCDP youth was bold because starting a business from the scratch is not easy, and for youth to succeed in the entrepreneurship journey requires five critical decisions–idea generation–skill acquisition–feasibility assessment of business goals/location analysis–seeking for capital to start viable business and then getting an experienced mentor to guide or advise the entrepreneur towards understanding markets via enabling profitability of the youth enterprise as a business–rice parboiling services, rice destoning & packaging, rice flour processing & packaging for market entry.