Agricultural universities as enablers of entrepreneurship

The Transforming African Agricultural Universities to Meaningfully Contribute to Africa’s Growth and Development (TAGDev) initiative is helping students to translate their research into viable businesses and universities to become enablers of entrepreneurship.

University World News spoke to Dr Anthony Egeru, programme manager for training and community development at the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity-Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), who also oversees the project, about how much impact it is having.

UWN: The TAGDev initiative is meant to change universities’ approach to job creation and entrepreneurship. What are its key features?

Anthony Egeru: The TAGDev programme is designed around three change angles of: individual transformation focused on the student and academic staff of universities; institutional transformation focused on universities and technical and vocational education and training institutions; and community transformation, targeting smallholder farmers and other value-chain actors.

Within it, entrepreneurship as a pivotal approach for supporting and enabling successful youth transition from university to the world of work. It is implemented as an experiential learning process. Instead of studying entrepreneurship in theory, students have the opportunity for practice.

They develop business plans and implement the business while on campus. They have the opportunity to make profit or make losses, but the bottom line is the skills and learning that emerge from the process. Once the students have created the company, they can transition with their business out of the university and expand their enterprise growth.

UWN: Universities have been criticised for failing to produce graduates who can employ themselves or become entrepreneurs. Was this the rationale or justification for this initiative?

Egeru: The rationale behind the TAGDev initiative was to respond to four challenges: firstly, how to transform smallholder agriculture through the use of largely available knowledge and technologies; secondly, how to engage the underutilised potential of universities to contribute to agricultural development through the training of quality, entrepreneurial and innovative graduates; thirdly, how to harness the immense potential of youth within Africa; and, fourthly, how higher education can strengthen the education pipeline from primary to secondary, TVET and university in Africa.

UWN: What is the scope and funding of this initiative?

Egeru: This is an eight-year project (2016-2024). It is designed to follow a ‘cascade approach’: Gulu University in Uganda and Egerton University in Kenya are the early adopter universities that provide the initial learning experiences upon which other RUFORUM member universities build their projects on a competitive basis. To date, 21 other universities have joined the implementation through different avenues, including entrepreneurship, community action research projects and technical skills development programmes.

UWN: What kind of reception has the programme received so far?

Egeru: The demand has grown in a big way. For example, we receive, on average, 650 applications for masters degrees annually, and 700 applications for advertised undergraduate scholarships. This for an average of 50 scholarships awarded.

UWN: What are some of the benefits and impacts that the initiative is delivering to students and other groups?

Egeru: Together, across the programme and through various programming routes, we have, thus far, supported 454 students at PhD, masters and undergraduate level with study opportunities. Some 780 students have had practical experiential learning in entrepreneurship, and over 480 academic staff within universities have been engaged in the programme supervision as academic advisers. The student enterprises have created 692 jobs and the programme has directly engaged 42,000 farmers, with immense benefits to their households. Several business opportunities for farmers through growth of sales volumes have been experienced.

UWN: How are host universities benefiting or gaining from this project?

Egeru: Beyond student enrolment, Egerton University and Gulu University have gained from curriculum review and development. Some 300 courses have been reviewed across nine academic programmes. There is now effort to upload these courses on e-portals to support online facilitated learning.

In addition, universities have benefited through the development of strategies such as the Engagement Strategy and Farm Attachment Strategy.

Academic staff have also been ‘retooled’ in several aspects such as case study development, entrepreneurship training, leadership and ‘visioning’, among others. Other universities have enjoyed greater community engagement and opening of their gates to communities, especially the rural smallholder farmers that they serve.

UWN: Have there been lessons for managers and other participants, including universities, faculty and students?

Egeru: Universities have noticed that they are active players in creating a vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystem. However, they need to transition from theory-based teaching to facilitate learning.

Universities need to reorient their systems and spaces within the institution to become enablers of entrepreneurship. This means that they need to work on their policies and guiding documents to allow them get the processes right.

University academics require an additional set of skills beyond the traditional professional skills that they have had. But, there is huge potential in ‘valorising’ innovations from within universities and their research, to turn them into business opportunities that can create jobs. We have seen this already in TAGDev with several students translating their masters and PhD research into viable businesses.

Students have immense potential but require spaces to discover that potential. They also require mentorship and support beyond the financial constraints in entrepreneurship development. However, not all students will create businesses; some are really fine and excellent researchers. This appreciation needs to be woven across the programmes and society.

UWN: What is the outlook for the future?

Egeru: We are looking forward to an opportunity to extend the programme beyond its current lifetime and bring on board additional funders to support its expansion.

Already, the African Development Bank, through the Sharing innovations and experiences from Korea for Higher Education Transformation in Africa (SIKET) project, has enabled support for three universities: Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Uganda, Sine Saloum El-Hadj Ibrahima NIASS in Senegal and Institut Polytechnique Rural in Mali, to develop incubation hubs to facilitate experiential learning based on the TAGDev approach. The future of the programme involves expanding in scope and scale and further entrenching learning.

Transforming African Agricultural Universities to Meaningfully Contribute to Africa’s Growth and Development (TAGDev) is an initiative of the Mastercard Foundation in partnership with the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM). It proposes to assist African agricultural universities and their graduates to respond to developmental challenges through application of science, technology, business and innovation for rural agricultural transformation.