ARIS — Strengthening Agricultural and Rural Innovation Systems: A Regional PhD Programme

The ARIS project seeks to develop a regional PhD programme in Agricultural and Rural Innovation Studies to enhance application of science and technology in improving rural livelihood and economic growth of countries in the Eastern, Central and Southern Africa (ECSA) region. Specifically, the project will strengthen the capacity of universities in the ECSA region namely; Makerere University in Uganda, Egerton University in Kenya and Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania to train competent and relevant professionals for research and development of the rural sector.


Main Activities

• Establishing a Steering Committee (SC) and secretariat to coordinate project activities. The SC will comprise of five persons: one representative of each of the partner universities, one from a regional organisation and the project coordinator. The secretariat will be hosted by Makerere University.
• Consultative visit by members of the SC to the European partners to explore and concretise areas of collaboration in preparation for partnership agreements through Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs).
• Designing and approving the curriculum. This is a process that will start with in-country stakeholder consultations in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania to identify the priority needs that the programme should address. A regional consultative workshop will consolidate outcomes of in-country consultations, further prioritise the focus and define the programme course content and develop modalities and institutional arrangements for implementation of the programme with the European partners.
• Developing the curriculum and learning materials. Following the consensus in the regional workshop regarding focal content areas, course decriptions and outlines will be developed by resource persons from the ECSA region jointly with the European partners. These will be used to develop documents for approval of the programme in the respective partner universities. Meanwhile the teams of resource persons will continue developing the modules for each of the courses described.
• Developing M&E and quality assurance mechanisms to ensure continuous reflections and learning from experience in order to improve the programme implementation. Quality is paramount in these processes and a mechanism for assuring quality will be established and institutionalised.

Project Coordinator: University of Makerere, Uganda
Partners: Egerton University, Kenya / Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania / Wageningen University,The Netherlands / Montpellier SupAgro, France
Duration 36 months
Implementation 01/01/2009 to 31/12/2011
EU Co-funding EUR 484.180
Total Budget EUR 571.372
Contact Dr. Paul Kibwika
Reference: Edulink