As part of implementing the Climate-Smart Agro-preneurship Education for Livelihood and Sustainability in Eastern and Southern Africa (AgrGrow) project, selected academic members from the Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST) on April 13 started a six-day capacity building training in problem-based learning (PBL) and competence-based curriculum (CBC).

The AgrGrow, which is part of a climate smart agriculture promotion initiative, seeks to change teaching and learning methodologies from content based teaching to the promotion of acquisition of skills, knowledge and competencies necessary to solve existing or anticipated challenges in society.

“We will have the training for six days, two days every weekend for three consecutive weeks. The university has identified two programmes to implement these methodologies as a start and before anything, we realized that the lecturers need to understand the concepts so that once we go into curriculum review to align them to the objectives of the AgrGrow project, they are well versed with the concepts,” said Ellasy Gulule Chimimba, one of the facilitators.

“Once we do the curriculum reviews, chances are high that there will be some changes made to the curriculum to align them to PBL and CBC principles. That alignment will also call for a change in the teaching approaches hence the need for this training for academic staff members. Eventually, it is our wish to embrace these methodologies across all our programmes.”

Under both CBC and PBL, the aim is to equip students with skills, knowledge and competencies that through entrepreneurship, they can use to solve society problems and earn a living.

Blessings Masina, another facilitator, said so far, the project has lined up a number of interventions including identification of industry partners where students can take up challenges and find solutions for them.

 

The project is being implemented by four universities, namely Bugema and Makerere universities from Uganda and Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (Luanar) and MUST from Malawi. 

 

AgrGrow also works with Hame University of Applied Sciences (HAMK) from Finland, University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) in Uganda who are coordinating the project.

 

The project which aims at improving curricula, has been co-funded by Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.