2 bodies develop climate smart agriculture curricula for universities
The Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA), in partnership with the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) and the West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL), has ended a three-day capacity building of trainers on building a university curriculum with a specialised focus on Climate Information Systems (CIS) and Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA).
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The rationale was to build the capacity of the lecturers and to improve on the modules and training materials for lecturers for teaching climate smart agriculture and climate information systems.
The workshop was also used to obtain feedback from the lecturers on the modules already in the system and to improve on them.
Modules
The participants were taken through four thematic modules: Soil Carbon Sequestration and Crop Production; Disaster Risk Management in Crop Production, Livestock, and Aquaculture; Renewable Energy, Water Resources, and Agriculture; and modules developed specifically for CSA and CIS.
These modules were designed to contribute to AICCRA's broader mission of creating accessible training resources through RUFORUM's online platform.
The Director of WASCAL Graduate Studies Programme in Climate Change and Adapted Land Use at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) Prof. Wilson Agyare, in address, said there was the need to critically address climate change, which he said, has become a pervasive issue affecting agriculture.
He said a timely provision of information on issues such as rising temperatures and erratic rainfall would help farmers to adapt to climate related challenges to protect the sector which is the backbone of the African workforce.
For his part, Prof. Brice Sinsin, the WASCAL Scientific Advisory Committee Chairman, said scientists have a critical role to play in ensuring the transmission of valuable knowledge to the next generation.
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He said it was therefore important to integrate the new curricula into Graduate Studies Programmes (GSPs) and to focus on key issues related to agricultural productivity in West Africa.
The conference was attended by lecturers from RUFORUM, AICCRA, KNUST, the University of Environment and Sustainable Development (UESD), the University of Energy and Natural Resources (UENR), the International Fertilizer Development Centre (IFDC), and WASCAL alumni.