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Educating Entrepreneurs Tool-Kit

Critical Need Being Addressed

The challenges facing Africa today are enormous, and require collective, strategic collaboration to overcome. Across the continent it is universally recognized that it is imperative to harness the power and potential of smallholder farmers to contribute to the economic development and alleviation of poverty in their countries.

Description of Initiative

EARTH University’s collaboration with African institutions began as a result of the Sustainability, Education and the Management of Change in the Tropics (SEMCIT) international seminar series, co-convened from 1999-2003 by EARTH and the Salzburg Seminar in collaboration with the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. SEMCIT focused on the problems of sustainable development and the vital role that higher agricultural education must play in addressing these challenges. The project was supported by the government of Norway and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and reflected their strong belief in the EARTH educational model and the potential it represents for promoting development in other regions in the world.

SEMCIT was a unique and far-reaching process in which 360 stakeholders (including academics, NGOs, representatives of government, donors, the private sector, farmers, and students), from 198 different institutions and 73 countries were the protagonists. Participants reached a broad consensus on the urgent need for transformation in tertiary agricultural education systems worldwide. Among other things, participants concluded that graduates must be more entrepreneurial and able to create jobs, rather than simply seek jobs. They voiced great frustration at the inability of their educational programs to produce this result.

Although SEMCIT concluded in 2008, there have been many subsequent exchanges and visits of faculty between African universities and EARTH, as well as many requests for EARTH to participate in international forums discussing the potential of the EARTH learning model to promote transformation in African institutions. EARTH has received repeated requests from African institutions for materials and a methodology that would enable them to initiate a curriculum review process and work toward implementing an undergraduate entrepreneurial education program based on EARTH’s model and principles of experiential learning. The Educating Entrepreneurs Tool-Kit will provide African educators with this possibility.

BFI Assessment Summary

Costa Rica’s renowned EARTH University has been honing a three-year program that gives students hands-on experience in agro-ecological business development. It has seen many of its graduates set up successful sustainable food production businesses around the world. The great success of the program is also reflected in its thriving partnership with Whole Foods, which has seen some of the program’s students’ ideas integrated into the supply process. Now EARTH University is seeking to develop a tool-kit that embodies its agro-ecology curriculum that could be disseminated to educators worldwide to create new generations of successful sustainable food producers and job creators, especially in the Global South. Their first partnership to further this goal is with Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), a hub for a consortium of 25 universities in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa, which acts as a think-tank and research center to generate new models of education in the agricultural sector.

RUFORUM has already launched a program that sees its graduate students work with farming communities to identify and understand their assets and needs. The plan is to bring in EARTH University’s know-how and weave it into RUFORUM’s “Community Action Research” to create a robust model that is specific to the local context. The Educating Entrepreneurs Tool-kit will emerge as a result of this process.

Both organizations have enormous competency and sensitivity in dealing with local cultural and social-political conditions and will co-design a socially appropriate, place-based tool-kit. The actual tool-kit will be a multimedia package and is only in its conceptual phases right now. They want to build in flexibility to allow tweaking of the kit for educators operating in different contexts. A critical component is capacity building for agricultural business entrepreneurship and the ability to identify and plug into markets. All the pieces seem to be in place. If they won the Challenge, their next step would be to develop schematics and design the actual tool-kit that integrates the two programs.

Making the tool-kit is the easiest step. The biggest hurdle may be the cultural transference of the principles, values and techniques from Central America to Africa. EARTH University is known for a nurturing environment that inspires and supports students and its strong commitment to ecological principles, which RUFORUM shares. RUFORUM is a very effective and respected institution with a large network, ideally poised to disseminate this type of tool-kit. The two organizations demonstrate a strong alignment that was reinforced during the interview, so cultural transference seems promising. There appears to be a natural compatibility for partnership across values, discipline and spirit and some preliminary work is underway.

Both organizations clearly have a strong track record for developing and implementing their own successful educational programs. There is also strength in the South-to-South relationship between Latin America and Africa and the unique intellectual and cultural exchange that can be used to bolster both programs. This partnership and the comprehensive, integrated tool-kit being developed makes for a very exciting new model that could have critical implications to revitalizing agro-ecoregions all over the world.

PEOPLE: Earth University Faculty

EARTH’s world-class faculty is composed of a multi-cultural group of professors from 19 different countries from around the world with extensive teaching and research experience. Faculty are principally selected for their devotion to teaching, their prior experience in agriculture and environmental sciences and their commitment to working with young people and with members of the community to improve sustainable practices around the world. Collectively, EARTH’s professors have studied and done research throughout Latin American, the Caribbean, the U.S., Africa, Asia and Australia. Faculty is organized not by department, but by class year and take a very active role in the formation of the students. Their job extends beyond the classroom and their teaching’s impact is seen in the communities where EARTH students are working and becoming leaders.

ABOUT EARTH University

Since 1990, EARTH University’s innovative educational approach has been preparing young people from Latin America, the Caribbean and other regions, including Africa and Asia, to contribute to the sustainable development of their countries and construct a prosperous and just society. EARTH (www.earth.ac.cr) offers a four-year undergraduate program in agricultural sciences and natural resources management, providing a world-class scientific and technological education that emphasizes values, ethical entrepreneurship and environmental and social commitment. Through the generous support of donors and an endowment, EARTH University provides opportunities to young people who want to make a difference in the world but lack the financial resources for a higher education.

Today, its more than 1,500 alumni are contributing to sustainable development. Thanks to EARTH’s entrepreneurial focus, 23 percent of alumni run their own or family business, and an average of four jobs have been created per graduate for those with 10 or more years since graduation.

ABOUT RUFORUM

The Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), a consortium of 25 universities in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa, was established in 2004. The consortium originally operated as a program of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1992. RUFORUM has a mandate to oversee graduate training and networks of specialization in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) countries. Specifically, RUFORUM recognizes the important and largely unfulfilled role that universities play in contributing to the well-being of small-scale farmers and economic development of countries throughout the sub-Saharan Africa region.

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