Agriculture is the backbone of Afghanistan’s economy, and is dominated by smallholders who mostly grow wheat, barley, fruits and nuts. Approximately half of the country is also used as seasonal rangelands for livestock, especially small ruminants.

However, more than thirty years of war and instability have had serious consequences on these activities, on farm infrastructure and on the institutions that support agriculture. This situation has also led to a loss and failure to renew the knowledge and skills needed to produce, innovate and adapt to changes.

One of the priorities of the Afghan government is to rebuild the agricultural education system throughout the country to ensure that young people not only get access to education, but to drive innovation in the agricultural sector as a whole. The Agricultural Technical Vocational Education Training (ATVET) project forms part of the response to this need.

Agricultural education

Afghanistan has seen the number of agricultural high schools grow from 30 in 2011 to almost 100 throughout in 2013. To support this development, the National Agriculture Education College (NAEC) was established in Kabul in 2011, providing a two-year teacher training programme for people going on to work at the agricultural high schools. NAEC has a faculty of 30 teachers, 6 of whom are women. Now in its second year, the training college has 275 students coming from 23 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. This year, the student body includes a group of 19 female students hoping to become teachers.

Students undergo a rigorous entrance examination. NAEC staff is finding that Afghanistan’s education system has lagged behind – not only in terms of students missing important practical skills in agriculture, but also in terms of teaching methodologies. Formal education still is mainly based around a system of learning by rote, and the learning materials are largely theoretical, based on textbooks rather than on practical farming and field exercises. The result is that if students have not grown up on a farm, they lack experience in literally “getting their hands dirty”, and find it difficult to encourage others to do the same when they become teachers.

Practical skills

A key didactic strategy in the NAEC curriculum is to develop a hands-on training process that also stimulates the future teachers to use more creative teaching methods. The school grounds contain 5 jeribs, the equivalent of one hectare of land, and include a permaculture garden and greenhouse. Students are encouraged to experiment with what they have learnt, and to compare different farming approaches, including sustainable processes like mulching and composting. Muhammad Ayaz, a current second year student at NAEC, is pleased with this approach: “At the Agriculture High Schools we studied different agriculture concepts but only theoretically. However, here at NAEC, we are ‘learning by doing’, practising pruning, grafting, growing vegetables inside and outside the greenhouse, and more. I am very happy that I can now tell people that I know about these practices.”

At the beginning of 2013, 21 of NAEC’s faculty received training in participatory teaching methods (e.g. more interactive teaching, role play, debates, field visits etc.) at the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR) in the Philippines. NAEC’s Education and Training Advisor, Michelle Glenn, sees clear benefits in how the teachers carry these new methods into their own classrooms: “This is the first time the students at NAEC have been taught in this way: they are very enthusiastic once they get over their initial shyness in participating. In fact, our second year students are demanding even more interaction now.”

More female students

In Afghanistan, women are involved in most farming activities, including poultry and dairy production. Nevertheless, agriculture is, in general, a male domain. At present, only a few girls attend agricultural education institutions, though more and more are becoming interested in improving their knowledge and skills. Afghan society currently prefers that girls are taught by female teachers, and teaching is one of the few accepted public roles for women. To encourage higher attendance at these agricultural high schools, it is important to train more girls to become teachers at them.

Besides the problem of few female AHS graduates, other barriers stop female candidates from applying to the NAEC. One important factor is that students’ families do not want their daughters to live away from home in a dormitory. NAEC is tackling these kinds of issues in a stepwise fashion. A first decision was to focus on female candidates from the Kabul area only, so that they could still live at home. It was then decided to arrange daily transportation to the college. Another step was to create an agricultural preparatory course for the female candidates, to allow them to catch up on basic agricultural knowledge. Lastly, the group of female students are taught in classes separate from the males.

All of these efforts are paying off. After the prep course, the girls were given the same entrance exam as the rest of the student body. They ended up scoring very highly, with the lowest score being 75%, while the entry requirement was 50%. They gained a lot of respect from the rest of the students through this achievement. The group of 19 female students is very motivated. The college hopes that once these girls have shown how successful they can be, the rest of the barriers can be removed one by one. One idea for example, is to establish a female dormitory so that girls can come from other areas of the country.

These are still early days for the NAEC and the agricultural high schools. Setting up new institutions and changing societal attitudes in such an unstable and uncertain environment is fraught with challenges. Slowly but surely, a positive and remarkable change in the Afghan agricultural education system will come.

Mundie Salm and Ayesha Sabri

Ayesha Sabri is the Training and Education Director at NAEC, Kabul.
E-mail: sabri.ayesha@yahoo.com.

Mundie Salm is curriculum developer for the same project, based in Wageningen.
E-mail: mundie.salm@wur.nl

More information on this project: Improving agricultural education in Afghanistan

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However, the growth in demand has given rise to land conflicts, deforestation and biodiversity loss, issues that have shaped the global debate. Joyce Msuya shares some lessons from a recent major multi-stakeholder process led by the World Bank Group (WBG) to help improve its palm oil strategy.

“The scale and format of these consultations were new for us,” explains Joyce Msuya, who oversaw the recent WBG palm oil consultations. Nine face-to-face workshops were held around the world with nearly 400 (out of 1,200 invited) people from civil society organisations, local groups, businesses, smallholders, government and research institutions participating. Thousands more took part in an electronic consultation.

Msuya is happy with the amount of useful feedback received from all the stakeholders. The consultations brought up many concerns that will need to be addressed in the WBG’s new palm oil strategy, although as Msuya says, “we never set out to get 100 percent agreement between them all.” The facilitators’ synthesis report does show some agreement, as stakeholders made “strong calls for the WBG to take a strategic role in the sustainable development of the sector.”

Msuya identifies a number of factors that contributed to the success of the consultations. Firstly, “we designed it to be as dynamic, open and transparent as possible.” For example, a website was created to post summaries of all the consultations and reports immediately. An independent facilitator, using varied participatory methods, also helped set the tone.

“We were lucky to get an excellent facilitator who was perceived as objective and neutral throughout the consultations. He helped us to take an iterative approach, which means that we kept adjusting the process as we learned more about what worked best and what not so well,” says Msuya. The “up-front and candid” face-to-face consultations played a key role in getting participants to voice their views while also being able to agree to disagree in a “mature way”. Msuya explains this further: “People needed to understand their connectivity. We all have more in common than differences – we all want the sector to be sustainable, inclusive and to reduce poverty”.
The concept of partnership was also important – that all participants have a role to play, while recognising the many challenges that exist.

Text: Mundie Salm

Illustration: Fred Geven

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Protecting special agricultural systems is not easy. It starts with proper recognition, which according to Boerma is a major challenge: “One of the biggest lessons from the pilot project was that in order to maintain these systems, you need to spend an enormous amount of time sensitising governments to put the farmer at the centre.” In places with top-down governments, a whole change in thinking needs to take place.

“In Africa you have to work hard to get rid of the deeply engrained prejudices about small-scale farmers and traditional systems being backward.” GIAHS is a concept that crosses many sectors, and this involves learning how to bring together different government agencies to work towards a common goal.

Boerma works in two countries with a mixture of ministries and agencies, with responsibilities for agriculture, livestock, the environment, wildlife services, heritage, tourism and natural resources. He insists that all the team members attend all the meetings, which has paid off: “nobody blocks the process because everyone is included.” The first step is getting people to recognise the importance of GIAHS: after that the protective policies can (eventually) be put in place.

Farming communities are often confused by conflicting advice, much of it telling them to abandon their old ways. Boerma works from the principle of “free prior and informed consent” in guiding communities to come to informed decisions about the consequences, good or bad, of different choices, as well as the risks involved.

Establishing exactly what to preserve is often a major discussion point. While the World Heritage Convention seeks to preserve sites exactly as they are, GIAHS is based on the concept of “dynamic conservation”. This means supporting the continued existence of a special landscape or agroecosystem, but allowing it to adapt so as to ensure food security and sustainable livelihoods for farmers.

Boerma explains: “These systems are innovative because they are able to adapt to specific ecological and cultural processes in the area.” For example, the Maasai’s rotational grazing system in Kenya and Tanzania is under pressure because of a decreasing land base for pasture and a lack of access to water. By building water points and starting sustainable tourism activities the project is trying to prevent this unique GIAHS from disappearing.

More information: David Boerma can be reached at AWF, P.O Box 2658, Arusha, Tanzania, or via e-mail: david.boerma@fao.org.
More information about GIAHS can be found here: http://www.fao.org/nr/giahs/en

Text: Mundie Salm

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Project WET is mostly aimed at educators and students in primary and middle schools. However its resources, which include curriculum guides, booklets of activities, games, posters and other materials, can be used much more widely. The topics cover all the basics about water – from hygiene and water quality, to learning about the water cycle, watersheds, groundwater and floods.

The concept of watersheds is close to DeYonge’s heart: “A saying that holds true for everyone is that ‘we all live downstream’. We all live within a watershed and I firmly believe that when people understand what this is and how we are all connected by water, then they will behave more responsibly in taking care of it.” This underlines the importance of taking a “watershed approach” when addressing environmental problems.

For more about Project WET and their publications, visit www.projectwet.org, where you can download the “Sum of the parts” exercise and the free booklet “Healthy water, healthy habits, healthy people.” Other publications are available by clicking on STORE, or by writing to: Project WET Foundation, 1001 West Oak Street, Suite 210, Bozeman, Montana 59715, U.S.A

Watersheds as “sum of the parts”

Watersheds are a difficult concept to explain. Project WET defines a watershed as “an area of land that drains into a specific body of water like a river, stream or lake” and includes everything within its borders. A large watershed, such as the Nile’s watershed in northeast Africa, can also contain many smaller watersheds around streams that drain into the Nile river.

But what about people who live in a less obvious watershed? A simple exercise can be used to explain the concept of watersheds anywhere: all you need is a mound of clay, a cup and some water (see illustration, and see box to download the full activity).. Project WET uses this simple tool to get people to simulate water falling down slopes, to understand how water drains down a slope in a particular direction, and how watersheds have boundaries and can also consist of smaller watersheds.

DeYonge hopes that such simple exercises can help people better understand basic concepts about water and apply this understanding to water resource issues in their community. This is central to Project WET’s ”ActionEducation” programme, which encourages schools and communities around the world to organise educational workshops and events, and to then apply their knowledge to help solve a local water resource issue. She explains about a recent festival at a middle school in the United States which stimulated students to set up a recycling programme at their school. Getting serious and difficult concepts across does not have to be boring. To DeYonge, simple games and investigative exercises help show that “learning can be fun” while also going a long way to get people to use shared resources in a responsible way.

Text: Mundie Salm

Illustration: Fred Geven

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A lot of valuable training materials about rural finance are already out there, so instead of re-inventing the wheel, we bring together resources from around the world into one site,” explains Ake Olofsson, Rural Finance Officer at the FAO. Olofsson is also one of the editors of the Rural Finance Learning Centre (RFLC) website.

Going beyond simply offering publications, the RFLC gives people direct access to practical tools to learn and teach about finance issues. It includes downloadable modules to help trainers give short courses, as well as self-study and online interactive lessons on topics relating to microfinance, agricultural finance, savings and enterprise development.

Videos with examples from developing countries help bring the issues alive. Other tools include handouts and presentations, as well as ideas for group games to learn about accounting or setting up a business in a rural setting. According to Olofsson, “it is not easy to find good material and we rely on outside people, including subscribers to the site, to suggest resources. Where needed, we improve their format and fill in the gaps with new material.”

The site is a learning resource and can always benefit from more feedback and discussion, something that Olofsson welcomes. While the RFLC is set up to encourage the provision of better financial services it does

Rural Finance Learning Centre

The Rural Finance Learning Centre can be found at www.ruralfinance.org, or contacted via e-mail: rflc@fao.org. The RFLC is a joint initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Bank and the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ).

give a balanced view, providing access to publications and lessons that look critically at the limits of microfinance in meeting the needs of the poorest, and other specific social concerns. The site is user friendly and most of its resources are free and easily downloadable. Many materials are available in English, Spanish and French.

For those with weaker Internet connections, most pages are also viewable in a low bandwidth format. However, some resources, such as the online lessons need a fast connection to work properly. Also, the videos can be viewed with one kind of media player only.

Some of these problems will be solved in the near future as the site is about to be updated. And for those without internet access “we have been thinking of making a CD-ROM available”, says Ake Olofsson.

Text: Mundie Salm

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Exactly how many pastoralists there are is unknown. Estimates range between 100 to 200 million households around the world (see the article on page 32). Mobility is central to pastoralism, and children need to stay with their families to learn different production tasks. These demands make it difficult for them to use the education and other services that are designed for sedentary people.

Current models of formal education depend on getting teachers and materials to scattered populations in remote areas. This is logistically difficult to organise, expensive, and usually not very successful.

In meetings with pastoralists in South Asia and Africa, Caroline Dyer, researcher on mobile education, finds the same message everywhere: “Contrary to what people assume about nomads, they do want an education – they want to know what is going on in their countries and elsewhere. And it is their right – they should not be deprived of an education just because they are mobile.”

Radio broadcasts for learning

The new Open and Distance Learning strategy is a joint initiative between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry for the Development of Northern Kenya, supported by IIED. It offers innovative combinations of flexible teaching methods – a combination of radio programmes, face-to-face teaching and printed materials. Dyer explains that “the fundamental thing is to find a way to deal with mobility. We need to be realistic about what is available and see what technology can serve the needs best.”

About the curriculum, Dyer says plainly: “They don’t want a second-best education”. In the past, educational programmes have not offered material relevant to nomadic people’s way of life. It is difficult for pastoralist students to relate to a topic such as animal husbandry, for example, when it is based on the viewpoint of sedentary farmers, rather than techniques of drylands pastoralism. The ODL strategy will localise subjects such as literacy, math and sciences to reflect pastoralists’ daily reality and knowledge. This curriculum must be nationally recognised to ensure high quality.

The ODL strategy reduces dependence on teachers, but some face-to-face teaching is necessary. Attracting good teachers to remote and isolated “mobile schools” is challenging, and they tend to be poorly paid, have low credentials and often do not speak the pastoralists’ language. Says Dyer: “We need to think differently about teachers and how to recruit them.” Having pastoralist learning facilitators in the populations is the long term aim. Until then, teachers from outside need training programmes to get an understanding of pastoralist livelihoods.

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