Universities in Africa need to change their approach to pedagogy in agriculture education if they are to produce graduates who can contribute to sustainable agricultural production and food consumption patterns on the continent.

The institutions need to shift their approach to delivering education from theory to experiential and participatory learning, with the lecturer acting as a ‘facilitator’, said Professor Jose Zaglul, the president of the Global Consortium of Higher Education and Research for Agriculture.

Putting emphasis on learning as opposed to teaching has proved to work elsewhere in the world, including in the Americas, something that African universities could also emulate, said Zaglul.

The switch from teaching to learning, he told the Global Dialogue of Higher Education, Research and Advisory Services Networks and selected Actors, meeting under the auspices of the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit dialogue (UNFSS), had the potential to transform agriculture in a manner that was “scientifically viable”. The change in pedagogy would also allow students to “discover learning”, he noted.

“If we want succeed in producing agriculture graduates that can change the way things in this field are today, one of the things we should do is place more emphasis on research and become more experimental.

“We should also involve students in research, even as undergraduates,” said the former president of EARTH University, a private, not-for-profit institution in Costa Rica.

“In addition, make sure you send students for internships in the private sector for at least one term and combine [this] with a stint in community service. This will encourage students to want to become professionals in agriculture,” he told the event hosted by the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM).

Explaining concepts to students using such new methodologies will raise students’ interest in agriculture even more, and aid in producing graduates with an entrepreneurial capability, Zaglul noted.

Universities globally, he said, had “a lot of answers”, including technologies they had invented that could help solve challenges facing food systems, noting that new approaches in graduate training had been effective in raising youth interest in agriculture in Latin America.

By the late 1980s, when EARTH University was founded, for example, youth interest in farming was as low as it currently is in Africa, and attracting the young into the field may have contributed to the region becoming a major exporter of food while Africa remains a notable importer, he said.

Agents of change

Academic institutions are “the best suited to produce a quick change in the world”, and the UNFSS process was an opportunity for them to show the world what they were capable of, Zaglul added.

“When we transform universities we will also transform the world,” he declared.

For universities to effectively participate in finding sustainable solutions to Africa’s food challenges, they will need to adopt a trans-disciplinary approach to research, encompassing all disciplines of relevant sciences, said Tawana Kupe, the vice-chancellor of the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Universities on the continent, he declared, should not be left behind in the UNFSS process, and should participate by offering “cutting-edge”, trans-disciplinary research, capable of informing policy formulation.

“We need to take advantage of the coming together of different disciplines to co-create new knowledge, and capitalise on biosciences and other rapidly expanding sciences for a radical transformation of food systems in Africa,” Kupe said.

The challenge of finding solutions to sustainable food systems was not a sectorial issue, he said, thus there was a need for people from different disciplines to come together if radical transformation were to be achieved.

Vice-chancellors of African universities, he noted, had identified problems, made recommendations for solutions to Africa’s food crisis and submitted them to the UNFSS working group. One of the suggestions made was the need to increase funding for research and research infrastructure across universities.

Believing that a solution for the continent’s problems was the responsibility of its people, the University of Pretoria, which he heads, had set up the Future Africa Institute, a trans-disciplinary research initiative that has hosted “world-class researchers”.

According to Professor Adipala Ekwamu, the executive secretary of RUFORUM, the UNFSS has been designed to, among other matters, encourage public discussion on reforming food systems for the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals.

The universities organisation (RUFORUM) has been picked by the United Nations as one of the champions of the initiative to “mobilise a diverse range of voices in every part of the world” before, during and after the summit.

The universities body also recognised that, with adequate funding for research and innovations, coupled with the right partnerships, academic institutions would effectively make their contributions in African agriculture, he said.

It was also important that universities maintain a focus on working together across sectors and across disciplines, said Professor Kay Muir-Leresche, a member of the RUFORUM international advisory panel. Universities, she noted, were well placed to provide both the facilities and facilitation needed for research, if adequately supported.

Governments, the private sector and farmer communities need multi-stakeholder platforms that develop, adapt and share information and develop the capacity for good agricultural practices, she added.

In addition, universities should prioritise extension and advisory services education to produce holistic graduates who can act as change agents.

This could be enhanced by formally integrating universities into a nation’s agricultural extension services. It is a model that is ripe for implementation and that has been proven to work in some developed countries, observed Richard Mulwa, an associate professor of horticulture in the department of crops horticulture and soils and the director of crop management research training at Egerton University in Kenya.

Changing the traditional higher education training model to a collaborative student-centred learning model is essential to the production of the critical mass of change agents for achievement of sustainable healthy food systems, noted Hellen Kongai of Makerere University’s Regional Centre for Crop Improvement in Uganda.