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Univen to benefit from Netherlands funding

Univen, together with the University of Limpopo and the University of Fort Hare secured a €1,6 million (R17,6million) funding from the Netherlands.

Last year these universities wrote a joint proposal to ask for funding for the “Capacity strengthening in teaching and facilitated experiential collective innovation at the three previously disadvantaged universities” project. Mr E Raidimi from the School of Agriculture at Univen says this project is called the “Netherlands Initiative for Capacity building in Higher Education” (NICHE). According to him the objective of the project is to improve the skills of university staff to deliver skilled graduates by integrating experiential learning and collective innovation into university curricula; student training and associated action research initiatives with rural communities, with particular attention to skills and gender constraints.

“The specific objectives are to integrate experiential, collective learning in modules of agricultural courses at the three universities, which includes practical field work in the form of community outreach projects that contribute to enhance rural livelihoods; and to establish a dedicated support framework for collective innovation at regional and national as platforms for peer review, quality control and sustainability.”

He says the target groups are the academic and non-academic personnel at Universities, students, rural communities and professional staff from all relevant institutions involved in the national framework. “The final beneficiaries are support services and ultimately rural communities engaged in small scale agriculture.” This project is a follow up to the Netherlands Programme for Institutional Strengthening of Post-secondary Education and Training Capacity (NPT) project, which was a four years (2005-2009) NUFFIC project.

The objective of this project was to enable specific South African higher education and Research and Development institutions to collaborate in order to provide more relevant, quality services to the agricultural sector, in support of equitable development and innovation. The project enabled participating universities (University of the Free State, University of KwaZulu-Natal, University of Fort Hare, University of Limpopo and the University of Venda) to integrate the capacity to educate and train agricultural research and development professionals , student s and trainer s in Agricultural Research and Development (ARD) skills that will enable and facilitate better support to the second economy farmers. “The project had three stages: establishing collaboration between  stakeholder s in agricultural research and  development and university system, in order to establish an interinstitutional ARD training capacity, enabling an inter-institutional group of ARD teaching staff to design and deliver demand-driven in-service and accredited ARD courses and/or programmes; and establishing ARD components in the curricula of participating universities to enhance the skills of research and development and teaching staff professionals active in the 2nd economy.

Through this project, the staff members of Univen were able to engage with other partners. These staff members researched, worked, wrote and published together with other members from the other partner institutions. They compiled a resource book on Agricultural Research for Development “Collective Innovation: A resource book”. The book is available in the library. A number of Univen staff attended the international short courses in the Netherlands. Raidimi attended the “ARD core course” and the course on “Professional Programme on design and management of learning programmes for rural innovation”, Mr M.Mashau attended a course on “Agri-business and food industry”, Ms Ramphinwa and Mr J Netshipale attended a course on “Market access and sustainable development”, Ms A. Mathaulula attended a course on “Building your capacity to facilitate a Multi-stakeholder and Social learning”. A student from the School of Agriculture, Department of Agric. Economics and Agribusiness (Mr M.S Mafuma) is in the process of finishing his Masters Degree with the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands. A number of key elements of the ARD approach to research were infused in the School of Agriculture curriculum.