A Tanzanian proverb offers African farmers this bit of advice: ‘Pray for good harvests but keep on hoeing.’ And that is exactly what most smallholder farmers in Africa continue to do year in and year out – toil hard to produce the food they need to feed their families and pray that their efforts will be rewarded.

Subsistence agriculture is still the backbone of the African economy, with more than two-thirds of all Africans living in rural areas and depending entirely on agriculture and natural resources for their livelihood. That means that for more than 600 million Africans, the land – and what they can coax from it – is still their only defence against famine. Famine is often caused by just a failed rainy season or a major flood on a continent where extreme rural poverty, environmental degradation and capricious weather patterns combine to make life – even survival – more precarious than perhaps anywhere else on earth.

This situation persists despite major investment during the early years of African independence in tertiary education that focused on agriculture, forestry and animal husbandry. The question that begs to be answered is why these post-independence efforts to establish tertiary agricultural education programmes did not generate the hoped-for improvements on the ground – for untold millions of smallholder farmers across the continent.

That is the question that the African Network for Agroforestry Education (ANAFE), with 124 partner institutions in 34 countries, set out to answer in 2002 with an in-depth study of tertiary education in natural resource management and agricultural education in 30 African countries. That study took 2 years and collected data going back a decade, culminating in a groundbreaking symposium, ‘Building Agricultural
and Natural Resources Education in Africa: Quality and Relevance of Tertiary Education’, organised by ANAFE at Kenyatta University in Kenya in April 2003.

Photo by Anthony Njenga

The 55 papers presented at the symposium have now been published in an important new book, Rebuilding Africa’s Capacity for Agricultural Development: The Roles of Tertiary Education. And a companion document was also produced, primarily for policy-makers and managers: A Stitch in Time – Improving Agriculture and Natural Resources Education in Africa.

According to August Temu, who coordinates ANAFE from the headquarters of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, these publications provide a veritable manifesto for change in how agriculture is taught in African universities and training colleges. Such changes are urgently needed if Africa’s farmers and its educational institutions are to meet the many challenges of our times that include: globalisation and liberalisation of trade and markets, environmental degradation, global warming, rising rural poverty levels, rural to urban migration, and the effects of such pandemics as HIV/AIDS and malaria.

“Africa has failed to invest in agriculture,” says Temu. “Farmers are still doing things just as their parents did, functioning on the ground as if we were in the 1950s. There has been no forward movement. The smallholders have not received new skills, and so we needed to see why not.”

Temu says a transformation in education is needed, but notes that it must start with a ‘transformation of minds.’ “The new publications and the momentum generated at ANAFE’s symposium are the start of that transformation.” The network has joined forces with the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), which in September 2004 funded an important workshop hosted by the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

By bringing together African and northern universities, research centres within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and the AU in the context of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), Temu says a new initiative has emerged in a concept known as BASIC (Building Africa’s Scientific and Institutional Capacity).

Temu says, “A Stitch in Time is a timely guideline for policymakers seeking to right some of the wrongs and fill in the gaps that have hindered agricultural development in Africa, and built barriers separating academics, technical personnel and farmers, rather than creating communication channels to allow the free transmission of knowledge and skills among them.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was a tremendous decrease in the number of holders of technical diplomas in all areas of agriculture and natural resource management,” he notes.“With the structural adjustment programmes driven by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), there were cutbacks to government involvement in all areas of agriculture and extension, the idea being that the private sector and nongovernmental organisations would step in. That didn’t happen. No one was dealing with the complexities of the integrated systems in which a single farmer might be managing, say, a few chickens, trees, maize and sorghum. There was an overall deterioration of knowledge and sharing mechanisms combined with the retrenchment of technicians.

At the same time,” he says, “there was an expansion in degree-level agricultural training, pouring a lot of graduates onto the streets”. But degree-holders who were able to find scarce professional positions seldom worked at the grassroots level where they could share their knowledge and skills with those who needed them – technicians, farmers and people working in rural development. Many agricultural graduates could not find work in their field and wound up seeking employment that had nothing to do with their agricultural education and degrees.

Grounded in African reality – decolonising agricultural curricula

A Stitch in Time also highlights weaknesses in the way agriculture has been taught and in the curricula the tertiary institutions had to offer, along with ways to remedy them. The study shows that curricula in African universities have been largely adopted from the countries that once had colonies in Africa, and so university texts on agriculture were founded on an imported philosophy and policy that aimed to produce cash crops for consumption by – and processing in – those former colonising countries.

Kenyan school children tend their school nursery Photo by: Anthony Njenga

Very little attention was paid to the local needs in Africa, and little of what was taught was grounded in African reality, especially in the reality of smallholder farms on the continent, where farmers integrated and sought to manage crops, trees and livestock in complex farming systems that stressed food security through diversity.

“And yet”, says Temu, “Tree seed and tree management are almost completely absent from any curricula.”

The study also noted that the Green Revolution, that had increased agricultural productivity and food production in other parts of the world – particularly India – never fulfilled the same promises in Africa, largely because policies, institutional arrangements and capacity for knowledge management were inadequate. In addition, products from natural forests in Africa continued to be harvested and exported in raw form – as did other agricultural outputs – denying Africans the crucial income from added value that could be accrued with local processing and packaging. However, studies in agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa have shown that integrated systems of crops, livestock and trees on smallholder farms have served the continent well in the past and can continue to do so.

Reconstructing agricultural education – one stitch at a time

“It is time”, says Temu, “ to rebuild agricultural education in Africa in a way that will turn farming into a respected and lucrative discipline that will lure the continent’s youth, rather than attract them only when all else fails and they turn to farming as a last-ditch way to survive. ANAFE has already taken a few stitches in time’ to start that reconstruction process, by establishing Learning Resource Centres for farmers where young people can see for themselves which farming systems can work for them, how they can produce more with less labour, and then add value to whatever they produce.”

Temu says Ethiopia has already begun a major transformation of its approach to agricultural education and training, by creating 15,000 farmer-training centres, each to be run by three resource persons, one responsible for crop production, one for animal production and a third for natural resource management and forestry. Temu says 45,000 Ethiopians are already being trained as resource persons. And in Uganda, he points out, the Government has developed a unified extension system that integrates all aspects of agriculture and value-addition for agricultural produce.

But are those ‘stitches in time’ enough to produce a continent-wide impetus for the transformation that the new book demands? Can they weave a new, adapted, practical and effective approach to education in natural resource management and improved agriculture across Africa?

“I am very optimistic,” says August Temu. “Our aim now is to get policy-makers and funding institutions on board and to convince them that investment is crucial to make agricultural education both useful and enticing. We did not dream this up, we have documented the problems – and the solutions.”