By: Bright Kofi Agamah & Mercy Darko
The Ministry of Food and Agriculture, with support from Global Affairs Canada, has over the past six years, embarked on some interventions in the country’s Agricultural Colleges as part of a national broader agenda to modernise agricultural education to help attract more young people into the agricultural sector towards food security.
The interventions are under the Technical Education Development for Modernized Agriculture in Ghana, TEDMAG. The project has a three-thronged approach which are the Modernisation of Agricultural Colleges Curricula, Development of Extension delivery systems and capacities; and the retooling and infrastructural upgrade of Agricultural Colleges.
The implementing partners are University of Saskatchewan-College of Agriculture and Bioresources, University of Missouri- College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources and University of Missouri Assistance Program, UMAP-GHANA.
The Principal Investigator of TEDMAG, Mary Burr, who spoke to GBC News on the sidelines of a two-day sustainability conference as part of a wrap-up activity to close the TEDMAG project, indicated that the project focused on equipping students with the requisite knowledge and skills to prepare them to become entrepreneurs after school.
“The programme is to enhance the knowledge and practice of modernised agriculture. We are working with primarily six agricultural colleges that are run by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, we are working extensively with agricultural extension agents across the country. The idea really is to make sure that all these people have the training to be able to actually build financially sustainable environment, so Ghana’s agriculture would become even more vibrant.
The Director of the University of Missouri Assistance Program-Ghana, Mawuli A.K. Asigbee, said the project has helped to enhance the teaching, particularly the practical activities at the Agricultural Colleges. He said students now have access to facilities that give them hands-on approach in agriculture. He expressed the hope that at the end of the conference, stakeholders will build synergies to improve the agricultural value chain.
“Students get to learn things the new way and are motivated to explore opportunities in agribusinesses. And that’s where the emphasis has been, so we are hoping to use this to create awareness about what is happening at the Agricultural Colleges, especially, which is just one component of the whole TEDMAG programme.”
Mr. Asigbee said there is a lot of changes happening in Agricultural Education and therefore “Agricultural practice is up for change and we need everybody to support that change. I’m talking about the whole change of every kind of commodity you can talk about. It’s a total change that is positioned to affect every Agricultural chain from crop to animals.”
Damongo Agricultural College is one of the beneficiaries of the Technical Education Development for Modernized Agriculture in Ghana. The Principal of the College, Mr. Adams Mohammed, said as a matter of fact, the College had some challenges prior to the intervention of TEDMAG project and that includes outdated curriculum which was used for almost a decade and a half without any major revision. It made it difficult for our graduates to meet industry needs as far as the labor market was concerned.
“We had hard challenges getting funding to do major curriculum revision until we had TEDMAG coming on board and they were quite interested in modernizing the curriculum and making it more relevant to the needs of the industry.”
He pointed out that as a result of TEDMAG support, the entire curriculum was revised and one of the major changes that came on board was the introduction of many Agribusiness courses. This is to curtail the unemployment situation that was being compounded by going the old way of training “our graduates and they need government to recruit them. It was a welcomed intervention to make it a more Agribusiness oriented course.
