The agriculture subprogram is one of the subprograms of the larger cooperation between the University of Rwanda and Sweden “the UR-Sweden program” for Research, Higher Education and Institutional advancement”.
The subprogram agriculture sources its importance in the political Economy of Rwanda, a country where the agriculture sector employs over 80% of the population while still running at traditional mode. It definitely needs transformation and modernization so as to be able to satisfy the demand. This development requires a considerable number of qualified Rwandan experts which should be produced by the Rwanda University platform. Yet the latter is still lacking sufficient highly qualified staff especially PhD holders required for quality education and high level research.
It is in this regards that the UR-Sweden program, through its subprogram Agriculture has committed to establish educational programs at both Master’s and Doctoral level, of international standard.
Priorities articulates around the following main objective: “to increase the critical mass of specialists with the technical and leadership skills needed to effectively contribute to the transformation and modernization of the Rwandan agricultural sector by educating Masters and PhD students”.
General objectives
This overall objective is intended to be achieved through four specific objectives for activities grouped in three main categories including training CAVM staff in Sweden at PhD level, developing curricula for PhD and Master’s programmes to be run locally by CAVM, training students at MSc level, and build research capacity of CAVM academic staff. The agriculture subprogram’s plans will be implemented in five years; 2013 – 2018. The present report the progress made in the above specific objectives of Agriculture subprogram for their third year; 2015 – 2016.
