Efforts are on-going in Africa to revitalise agriculture to support economic recovery and help the continent achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Unfortunately, the capacity to generate the needed innovations is quite limited, especially capacity for policy analysis to inform and influence decision making, management, planning and administration. The changing development paradigms also require capacity and competencies to realign research for development to cope with change. Unfortunately, the training offered by universities in this field has not kept up. This situation has weakened the quality of research and progress towards increasing food and nutritional security and alleviating poverty and generally slowed progress towards the MDGs targets of 2015.
The project is a response by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Eastern and Southern
Africa (ESA) to pool their efforts to build capacity for agricultural research and enhance the relevance of universities by producing market demanded products in terms of skilled human resource, technologies and processes. The overall goal of the action is to enhance the capacity of HEIs in the ESA region to contribute effectively to development and socioeconomic transformation of society. Specifically, the action aims at building, sustaining and strengthening regional capacity for impact-oriented research for development through training programmes which provide a solid foundation in research methods and promote collaborative networking to exploit regional research potential and inform policy.
Specific Problems to be Addressed
In the case of agriculture, there are currently glaring weaknesses in application of research methodology skills among researchers in ESA. The member universities of the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) plan to address this problem through training of a cohort of young and practical Research Methodology Specialists. RUFORUM also plans to retrain university teaching staff to have their research methods knowledge and skills upgraded to enable them be complete facilitators of the course to graduate students and other stakeholders.
Target Groups and Beneficiaries
The target groups in this project are the teaching staff of HEIs and post-graduate students, who are the future researchers. The final beneficiaries are the wider farming community and users of research innovations. Policy makers at national and local levels will benefit from access to evidence-based policy information, sound project monitoring, and widening access to participatory research methods. User friendly methodologies will be promoted to ensure and facilitate the flow of reliable and improved livelihood options to the poor and disadvantaged farming communities.
Expected Outputs and Results
At the completion of the project, participants will have acquired the skills to: ? Effectively engage in research for development to generate impact; ? Adopt approaches for integrating cross-disciplinary research for development; ? Conduct research at multi-scale levels, to move quickly and effectively beyond experimental plots to farms, landscapes and regions.
Proposed Activities
RUFORUM, through its member HEIs, proposes to implement the project by up-scaling inhouse university teaching staff skills enhancement programmes (short courses), as well as through a regional Masters degree training programme in Research Methodology for graduate students. These are the potential and immediate future staff of the relevant organizations in agriculture and rural development. Specifically, the project will be implemented through five major activities:
- Refinement of the project implementation strategy. This will involve consultations with participating universities to fine-tune the implementation strategy;
- Development of Research Methodology training modules for teaching post graduate students, academic and other research scientists;
- Training of trainers for the current Research Methodology specialists so as to enhance capacity and a more practice oriented approach to the teaching of research methodology and agricultural statistics;
- Kick-start the implementation of a joint Masters (Research Methodology) degree course for ESA universities;
- Short duration remedial courses for post-graduate students and researchers.
Sustainability and Impact
Overall sustainability will be built in two ways. First, efforts will be made to ensure that the institutions are involved in all activities from the beginning. Frequent consultations will be made to get buy-in from institutions. Consultations will continue to be made during the implementation period so that every one is kept aware of the progress of the project. Consultations and progress briefs will be made at senior management level, at faculty management levels and at participants’ level. Secondly, through training of self-motivated individuals, who are permanent members of the teaching staff of the participating institutions, the programme should be sustainable with minimum cost. Financial stability, dependence and collective ownership of the action by the partners, associates and collaborators will contribute to its long term sustainability.
The impact of the action includes lasting positive change in the quality and quantity of relevant action/impact oriented result with strong policy and socioeconomic utility. The priority target groups of lecturers and post graduate students, with the skills gained and partnerships formed, will have the capacity and commitment to do research of national, regional and global significance. The visible role the action will elicit commitment to its mainstreaming and subsequent scaling up.
