Training Youth to Lead Tomorrow’s Harvest with Tawazon Tabie

Unemployment among young people in Lebanon, especially in rural Lebanon, is a familiar story.

What’s less familiar is what happens when that story gets interrupted: with training, mentorship, and a real foothold in the field.

That’s the idea behind Tawazon Tabie, a Fair Trade Lebanon initiative funded by l’Agence française de développement (AFD). Over the past cycle, the project trained 90 young men and women across the Bekaa, giving them concrete, employable skills in an agricultural sector that is changing faster than most people realize.

Six Skills for a Changing Sector

Organic input production. Climate-adapted techniques for a growing season that no longer behaves the way it used to. Smart irrigation, which matters more every year as water becomes the thing farmers plan around rather than assume. Food processing and hygiene. Good agricultural practices. Business management, because a good harvest still needs somewhere to go.

Together, this isn’t a single skill. It’s the whole chain: what goes into the ground, how it’s protected, how it’s processed, and how it’s sold.

From the Classroom to the Cooperative

Training on its own can only go so far. Thirty participants have moved on to internships with their local cooperatives, the institutions that already anchor agricultural life in their communities.

That placement is not incidental. Many young people in the Bekaa grow up alongside a cooperative without ever really engaging with it. An internship changes that relationship. It places a trainee inside the cooperative’s day-to-day operations, working directly with the people who run it, rather than encountering it as a distant institution. In a region where opportunity has often meant leaving, that shift matters: it gives young people a functional reason to invest in the place they’re from, and the standing within it to do so.

Investing in Who Comes Next

Multiply 90 people across six skill areas and a handful of cooperatives, and the numbers stop being numbers. That’s what Tawazon Tabie is actually building toward: not a training certificate, but a Bekaa where fewer young people have to choose between staying and having a future.