AI-ENTR4YOUTH — Junior Achievement Romania's AI-for-Agrifood Curriculum Reaches 4,800+ High-Schoolers

AI-ENTR4YOUTH is a three-year programme coordinated by JA Europe with Intel and the European Commission, recognised by the World Economic Forum as one of the world's top eight AI-in-education initiatives. Originally launched in Italy, Portugal and Spain, it expanded via a partnership with EIT Food's Deep Tech Talent Initiative to seven more countries, targeting 18,000 students aged 16–25 with a programme-wide participation figure of over 12,000 against a 2026 target of 30,000.

Give secondary and vocational students hands-on AI skills applied to real agrifood problems, accessible to students with and without a programming background.

In Romania, Junior Achievement Romania runs the programme as "AI for Youth". The curriculum comprises 23 modules split into two tiers: a 32-hour no-code track covering AI fundamentals, the distinction between automation and AI, and ethical-use principles, plus an additional 20-hour code track using Python, Jupyter Notebook, Streamlit and CNN architectures. Students apply what they learn to agrifood problems — streamlining resource consumption, improving food safety and digitising supply chains — building datasets and image libraries in the no-code track and working prototypes in the code track.

More than 4,800 high-school students completed the programme in Romania during the 2024/2025 school year. Projects are showcased at Innovation Day events; in 2025 Romanian participation fed into Gen-E, JA Europe's flagship youth entrepreneurship festival held in Athens, where students from more than 40 countries presented AI-driven projects.

Publicly available reporting to date is participation and output data (student numbers, module completion, project showcases) rather than an independent learning-outcomes evaluation, so the evidence here should be read as documented reach and curriculum design rather than a measured impact study.