SUCAPRI (Strengthening University CApacity for Promoting, facilitating and teaching Rural Innovation processes)

Partners

Objectives

The specific objective of the project is to form "communities of practice" of teaching and managerial staff in the participating universities that actively improve teaching practice, facilitate rural innovation processes and develop teaching programmes in rural innovation.

The project started in early 2008. For more information, download the SUCAPRI profile (pdf, 165K) , or the progress reports (see right hand column).

ICRA's role in the EDULINK Project is confined to technical backstopping, i.e. input to major planning workshops and occasional input as resource persons to capacity building workshops, and provision of training materials. SUCAPRI group, March 2008

Achievements

• A core group of 6 ARD learning facilitators in each of the 4 participating universities developed action plans to scale up rural innovation competencies in teaching, research and consultancies. ICRA will strengthen capacities of and coach learning facilitators and facilitate inter-departmental/inter-university collaboration, and assist in linking up with (other) R&D stakeholders.
• The first of four workshops composing a University-based learning cycle was held in Kenya from 6 to 13 September 2008, with participants from Participants from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Egerton University, and the University of Nairobi. The remaining three workshops in this series were scheduled for early 2009.
• Early 2009, the second workshop of the University-based learning cycle took place at Egerton University. This workshop focussed on communication skills to support changes in dissemination practices, increased writing for different categories of audiences and increased use of ICT in learning and communication. The second meeting of the project steering committee was also hosted at Egerton. Initial planning for implementing the multi-stakeholder learning cycle in Kenya started.
  Due to arising problems project activities came to a standstill, in Kenya after February, in Uganda after July. It is hoped that these problems can be resolved before the end of 2009 and that activities may be resumed without too much negative impact on the expected outputs.