A model of an online agriculture and agripreneurship one-stop information portal / Ana Nabilah Sa’uadi

The unemployment or joblessness among youths and graduates is one of the global issues that is currently faced by governments around the world. Along many economic sectors, agriculture is one of the sectors that potentially offers employment opportunities and job creations. The Malaysian Economic Transformation Program (ETP) upstream the agriculture sector as one of the government's initiatives in addressing youths’ and graduate’s unemployment. In addition to the firm physical infrastructures and monetary aid in the operation of these agricultural initiatives, information management also plays its role by providing information-related services comprising of all critical aspects of agricultural and agripreneurship. However, further scrutiny of agricultural-centric official web-portals provided by government’s agricultural-related departments and agencies indicates that agricultural information resources, services and products are irrelevant, uncritical and scattered. This situation strains youths and graduates to explore opportunities and employments in agricultural-based business or agripreneurship. This study examines the agricultural information resources, services, products and activities provided by governments’ agricultural-related departments’ and agencies’ official web-portals prior to identifying 11 elements of agricultural information resources and services necessary as offerings to potential entrants to agricultural-related economic and agripreneurship activities in the fight against unemployment and joblessness. Adopting the qualitative approach, the model of 11 relevant and critical agricultural and agripreneurship information elements was communicated to eight (8) respondents using the structured questionnaire. The qualitative Hermeneutic analysis is applied in the analysis of data. The result of the Hermeneutic analysis indicates the above-average agreement levels and magnitudes with respect to the 11 agricultural information elements of the proposed model. The outcome of the research is the identification of the relevant and critical agricultural and agripreneurship information elements offering the know-what, know-when, know-why, know-who, know-where and know-how for potential agripreneurship. This model could be the basis for provision of information resources, services and products to encourage the involvement of youths and graduates in the agriculture and agropreneur industry.