A business school agricultural management program in Kenya started by two Tutu Fellows has reached another milestone. The agribusiness program was hatched by 2013 Fellow Nuradin Osman and 2015 Fellow Martin Mbaya at the 10-year celebration of AFLI in 2016. The program seeks to be scalable and to teach young people to go into farming professionally, provide support for the African agricultural sector, and help farmers do more with less. Students are now learning a range of hands-on skills and transitioning into work-placements.
The pilot programme was launched towards the end of last year and more can be read about it here in AFLI News (see below).
The first students enrolled at Strathmore Business School are now visiting farms and learning a range of hands-on skills on how mechanisation can boost farm production. At Rawhide Farm near Nakura, graduates learned how to use tractors in ploughing, planting and fertilizing, including the use of a deep subsoiler and why it has advantages over disking. Other equipment they learned to use included mowing and bailing equipment.
Many students have learned that there is a Catch 22 - organisations often require experience to hire, but without a job it is impossible to obtain experience. As part of the programme launched by Osman and Martin, AGCO is offering a work placement program so they can gain experience. Students from the Strathmore program are placed through AGCO and challenged with work-based projects that will add value to an aspect of AGCO’s value chain over a period of six to eight weeks. Of the 20 students in the pilot program, four are based in the AGCO global headquarters in Duluth, Georgia, U.S. A further 12 students are based at the AGCO office in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the remaining four are at the Future Farm in Lusaka, Zambia.
Aside from learning about mechanisation, students are learning about other agribusiness subjects that don't at first glance appear to have anything to do with farming. These include subject areas such as strategy, sales, industrial finance, business intelligence, after-sales, marketing, vendor management, distribution, and scalable, smallholder farming.
- READ MORE about how the programme came about
- READ MORE about first students enrolled in the programme
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