In the past years, many higher learning institutions have been training their students to be job seekers rather than job creators which had rendered many of them unemployed.
At tropical institute of development innovations under their academic programme they are aiming at producing job creators not job seekers. Students at TRIDI are getting the best hands on training because there is everything it takes to give them the skills needed. For instance, the students under the Applied Chemistry department are now able to make liquid soap, yoghurt, tomato sauce, wine, coffee and they sell them. They are also in the process of producing mineral bottled water.
‘’Here we demonstrate a number of innovative ideas that prop up mostly in Agro skills and also fuel production and dairy products. For example, we produce natural yoghurt that can be packaged and sold to earn a living. Many of our students are from humble backgrounds that need support for their survival. Therefore, we do these innovations to help them earn a living in future. One of the important products we produce here is tomato sauce which we have demonstrated and the students are now capable of producing it and we believe when they can go out there and make tomato sauce and sell and they will also be able to put to use the wasted agro produce when they go back to their villages, ’’said Milton who is the head of the chemistry department.
There is also production of soap and other innovations that are related to soap and this soap is taken as a commercial product and can be produced at large scale. At TRIDI they also have the capacity to produce the washing powders that are of different types.
‘’ That is the reason we invite people to come for training inorder to add value to what they have around them and also use their knowledge of chemistry to solve problems in their daily lives. There are other products like energy from saw dust, we have innovated and it can be packaged in cylinders for domestic use however we don’t have the capacity to do that yet but we can demonstrate. We also realized we have a problem of water and the students have been encouraged to innovate water purification and I think they have done it well and are ready to even scale it up to solve the water crisis in villages and in their homes and so they can do greater things. ‘’added Milton.
Tridi mainly gives Agro based skills to its students especially in the courses like Agriculture, Applied chemistry, Sericulture and Fashion and design plus so many others. Fashion and design students are trained to make clothes out of different fabrics like silk which is got out of silkworms that are being reared at TRIDI and sericulture is the backbone of this institute.
These agro skills are mainly aimed at creativity and innovation, job creation, employability, reduced post-harvest losses and improved Agro TVET perception.
Written by Mutonyi Rebecca
