Prof. Patience M. Mshenga
Prof. Patience M. Mshenga of the Faculty of Agriculture is the Principal Investigator in three award-winning projects: Strengthening Agri-Entrepreneurship and Community Engagement Training in East, West and North Africa (AgriENGAGE); Collaborative Action for Scaling Agri-Entrepreneurship and Industry Engagement in Food and Agribusiness Training in Sub-Saharan Africa (AgriSCALE); and Problem- based-learning Bio-economy Entrepreneurship and Capacity Building Programme in Africa (PBL- BioAfrica).
The AgriENGAGE and AgriSCALE projects are co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union as part the Erasmus+ Capacity Building for higher Education (CBHE). CBHE projects aim at improving the administration of Partner Countries' higher education, develop leadership and innovation capabilities, promote internationalisation, and modernise education systems. At the same time, the projects promote regional and interregional cooperation. PBL- BioAfrica is funded by the Higher Education Institutions Institutional Cooperation Instrument (HEI ICI), which supports cooperation projects between higher education institutions (HEIs) in Finland and the developing world.
The goal of the AgriENGAGE project is to strengthen HEIs, to provide excellent training programmes in Agripreneurship and Community Engagement responsive to evolving labour market demands to stimulate agricultural transformation and enhanced agricultural sector competitiveness. Key activities of the project include: establishing and institutionalising an agrienterprise fund scheme, setting up an agribusiness incubation centre and organising entrepreneurship competitions. The project will also review or develop curriculum for agripreneurship and community engagement depending on institutional needs that will be identified through an institutional capacity mapping survey, develop course modules that will enable effective training and engagement of youth in business, including through on-line platforms, and train academic staff and education facilitators in African HEIs in case study development and pedagogy/delivery methods. Summer schools, business clinics, farm/industrial attachments and roundtable discussions will also be organised by the project. AgriSCALE aims to create a new entrepreneurship learning ecosystem, which is based on problem based learning (PBL) principles of student- centred and competence-based education, collaboration and networking with industry and societal partners, and sharing knowledge through a community of practice. The project plans to achieve its objectives through: PBL curricula development workshops in which findings from a PBL survey will clarify the curricula and training objectives for each partner, revision or development of new curricula for African partners, student field challenges where Sub-Saharan students and European students work together in field teams to collect data and develop innovative solutions to the real-life cases, and PBL pedagogy workshops that will concentrate on pedagogical skills development for PBL method and discussing case studies.
PBL-BioAfrica is a collaborative project for strengthening the capacity in bio-economy HEIs in Kenya and Zambia. The focus is in developing PBL methods in bio-economy education, and utilising open distance learning (ODL) formats and open education resources (OER) in order to reach large numbers of students in partner HEIs. Students and graduates will be equipped with work-life relevant and entrepreneurial skills. Close collaboration with the industrial sector is central in providing students with real-life learning cases. Climate- smart agriculture (CSA) will be introduced as the guiding principle in business development. In addition, recognising the role and potential of women in agriculture will improve both equality and economic development. Another objective of PBL-BioAfrica is to strengthen the networks among HEIs nationally and internationally, as well as with the industrial sector. A network-based learning ecosystem will be established for developing bio-entrepreneurship education in the long term.
Administrator, AgriSCALE; Administrator, AgriENGAGE; Administrator, PBL-BioAfrica.
