Youth’s access to agricultural land in Sub-Saharan Africa: A missing link in the global land grabbing discourse

•Land access remains a barrier to youths’ participation in agriculture.•Yet powerful and rich actors continue to accumulate lands in the global South.•These land grabs produce mixed results, but insights into its impacts on youths is rare.•Rather, a false picture is painted that youths of the Sub-Saharan Africa detest agriculture.•Studies need to bridge this gap and provide a basis for youth friendly land policy in the region. Recent studies have called for investment in empirical research to give context-specific meanings to geospatial reports that land grabbing is rising. The response has been swift with literature emerging on the evolution and dynamics of land grabbing; including its contributions and impacts. One area that remains generally underexplored is the dynamics of landing grabbing in relation to youths’ access to land. Here, the authors argue that four issues – an impending youth bulge, a growing rebuttal of the long-held belief that Sub-Saharan African youths’ are not interested in agriculture, reports that land access is a barrier to youth entry into agriculture in the region as well as mounting evidence that emerging capitalist contexts redefine gender relations and roles – necessitate the urgent need for disaggregated studies to clarify the dynamics between youths and land grabbing. Specific knowledge gaps and research questions require answers to provide a basis for targeted policymaking on youths’ access to agricultural land.