It is not uncommon to see senior-level career persons fret about what their post-retirement lives have in stock for them. Retirement and post-service life are recurring thoughts in the minds of professionals in their mid and senior-level careers. Experience has shown that only very few persons maintain their social status after retirement.

Most people want to attain a level of financial liberty that can enable them to have exhilarating vacations and continue to be relevant to society, such as setting up a business and social enterprise that solves social problems and engages people. However, many people become completely very broke at the end of their careers.

There are many reasons why someone can go completely broke after retirement. The foremost among these reasons is failure to plan early. In your early and mid-career levels, it is possible to think you have a lot of time. However, time is not known to be lenient to the unprepared. Thus, it is essential for you as a salary earner to approach retirement with a lot of expectation, preparedness, and confidence.

The bitter truth is that increasing salaries or pensions will not make your dream of living a meaningful post-retirement life a reality unless you make deliberate and calculated efforts. It is important that your efforts are well-informed as much as they are deliberate. Your post-retirement planning must commence from the very first day you get your employment letter or even before then.

The following are some boxes you need to tick:

Financial intelligence/management

You need to connect with the necessity of early preparation for retirement through financial intelligence and management skills. Early awareness of financial management will help you develop good discipline and control of your finances. It is essential to prepare yourself for the financial realities that lie ahead of you so that you do not enter into the service with the wrong expectations and mindset that may result in gross disappointment and loss of morale during or at the end of your career.

Save as much as you invest

Savings and investments are often subsumed in the financial intelligence mentioned above. However, it is important to reconsider them here because your savings and investments work in line with your intention. Thus, while saving or investing your money, you need to be clear and fully convinced they are for your retirement.

Emotional Intelligence

Also important to have a successful career and post-service life is the instilment of emotional intelligence and a stable character that makes an ordinary man become exceptionally disciplined and dedicated to service.

Hone your entrepreneurial skills

While in service you can engage in some private ventures that can help you to make additional streams of income. This will not only increase your financial liberty, it also will help you to gather enough experiences outside your profession which will empower you to solve problems and commercialize your solutions in your post-retirement.

Continue to eye your post-retirement niche

It is possible that where you want to continue after retirement is completely different from where you are currently building your career. In this case, it is important that you constantly update yourself in that area. For example, after about 30 years of her career in Tennis, Serena Williams retired and took up Start-up funding which she said has been her hobby for a very long time.

Work with a mentor and professional advisor

You probably have someone within or outside your profession who seems to be living the kind of post-retirement life you dream of. You can approach this person for guidance and mentorship. There are also professionals or companies offering consultancy services for career individuals to help them to solve some of their retirement and post-retirement concerns. You should not hesitate to also reach out to benefit from this.

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The opportunities in Agriculture are quite numerous. Over the years, there has been a growing interest in increasing investment in the agricultural sector to unlock its numerous opportunities for the betterment of humanity. Recent development in agricultural technology is significantly improving the contribution of agriculture to global wealth, with the food and agribusiness sector leading the ecosystem.

About 9 billion people are expected to inhabit the world by 2050. This raises concerns on how to attain a commensurate growth in the world’s food production by that year. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the projected 9 billion population that world agriculture has to feed by 2050 implies that an additional agricultural investment of over 80 billion dollars is needed yearly to meet the targets for reducing poverty and the numbers of the malnourished.

Although Africa’s economy is largely agrarian, agricultural growth in the continent has been tardy compared to other parts of the world, especially countries in the global north. Africa’s Agriculture constitutes 14 percent GDP of the economy, and agricultural-related industry accounts for nearly half of all economic activities in the sub-Saharan regions.

In sub-Saharan Africa, less than 6 percent of the available two hundred million hectares of land is irrigated for agricultural productivity compared to 14 and 37 percent in Latin America and Asia respectively. Despite its huge agricultural potential, sub-Saharan Africa is the most malnourished part of the world. One in every four malnourished people in the world is from Africa.

Even though agricultural activities such as ecotourism, grain production, and animal production hold promising futures for Africa, it is evident that more needs to be done in terms of policymaking and implementation for the continent to achieve its huge agricultural potential. According to a report from McKinsey & Company in February 2019, Africa could actually produce two to three times more cereals and grains which would add 20 percent more cereals and grains to worldwide 2.6 billion tons of output and a similar increase in the production of horticulture crops, fishes and livestock could be witnessed.

Factors reported to militate against Africa’s agriculture sector include; poor financing, poor policies, poor infrastructure, high illiteracy, loss of farming character among the people, lack of access to land perennial insecurity etc. Stakeholders in the industry need to work collectively to weather these barriers that have since placed the continent at the ebb of the global food system.

More efforts should be made to encourage the use of new technologies and methodologies in agricultural activities in the continent with a particular focus on the agricultural data value chain.

While there has been no doubt an improvement in foreign investment in the agriculture of the continent over the years, there is still a scarcity of policies that protect the interest of Africans against foreign exploitation. According to the United Nations, foreign Investment contracts in Africa have captured nearly 50 million acres of land but these contracts were not always conducted diligently or openly, and local people are often overlooked as viable owners. Therefore African governments should protect the agricultural investment ecosystem of the continent through stringent policies that discourage foreign exploitation and consequently position Africa to achieve its agricultural potentials and gain massively from its plethora of natural resources.

Furthermore, more concerted efforts are needed from the agricultural stakeholders including the government, social enterprises and private investors to resolve the increasing security threats of the region which invariably affect its agricultural output in adverse ways.

Lastly, African leaders should think inwardly to locally address the impact of climate change in the continent, especially as this relates to the region’s food system.