19 August 2024, Africa: The CABI Academy, an online learning platform that addresses a range of agricultural challenges faced by smallholder farmers around the world, has launched a new free short course on Entrepreneurship in Agribusiness.
This self-led course provides guidance on how to start and maintain an agribusiness. The course is open for everyone interested in starting or growing an agribusiness including aspiring, new, and established agribusiness owners and as well as agribusiness educators.
Learners will cover what an agribusiness is, the different components involved, and how to develop the entrepreneurial behaviours and social skills needed to thrive in agribusiness development.
The introductory-level course, maps to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and is aimed at aspiring, new, and established agribusiness owners and agribusiness educators; providing best practice in key areas of agribusiness, combined with a technical and soft skills-based approach to help them build a successful agribusiness.
Learners can complete both a foundation level and a practitioner level certification assessment to embed their knowledge and skills as part of the course.
What makes a good agribusiness work well and succeed
Learners will learn about the challenges and opportunities to consider when starting and managing an agribusiness, how to fix problems that often occur in agribusiness and how to decide which agribusiness strategies are best for their situation.
Broadly speaking, in Africa, 70% of the population is involved in agriculture – despite this, a large proportion of youth remain unemployed. Overall unemployment rate is around 40%.
While agribusiness has the potential to create and scale up decent employment opportunities for young women and men through the creativity, energy, innovation and entrepreneurship of youth, the rate of conversion from agriculture to agribusiness is slow due to a lack of developed skills.
Onward effects of this include lost harvests and other forms of financial and non-financial impact, particularly in terms of community development and sustainability.
Course can be related to any product or service the young person provides
Deogratius Magero, CABI’s Youth Engagement Manager, Africa, said, “The Entrepreneurship in Agribusiness course is wide-ranging, allowing it to be adapted to any agribusiness
“The Entrepreneurship in Agriculture course unpacks the broader categories of opportunities in agriculture. So, this course is not only giving the skills, but also opens up the learner’s perspective of agriculture as having the potential to enable them generate income, either in the agricultural production or in the provision of services to farmers or along the agricultural value chains postproduction.
“The learners can flow through a journey, using or mimicking an example of an agri-entrepreneur’s process.
“This helps young people gather information and knowledge. Plus, the fact that it’s self-paced means the young person can do some of the course and then put into practice what they’ve learnt. Let’s say they take one hour every week and then practically apply that knowledge.”
Mr Magero added that the course has a mindset element, which encourages young people to reflect on how they develop and practice a growth mindset as they build their businesses, so they realize that their agricultural activities can be turned into an income-generating ventures.
“One of the things that I also love about the course is the element of financial literacy,” he said. “The course helps young people realize that there’s an entry point regardless of how much they have in terms of resources. It covers investment and reinvestment, which helps a young person understand that they can start small and utilize their little profits to build a big business over time.”
Those interested in finding out more and applying for the course can do so here.
Suite of courses and resources
The suite of courses and resources contained within the CABI Academy platform – which is powered by the CABI-led global PlantwisePlus programme – includes courses on Crop Pest Diagnosis, Crop Pest Management, Soil Management Practices and the free eBook – the Diagnostic Field Guide.
The freely available Introduction to Bioprotection Products course and assessments cover choosing, using, and interpreting the results of bioprotection products. The course explains how nature-based pest and disease management practices can be used and provides guidance and activities for learners to explore what these products are, how they work and how farmers can get the most out of them.
CABI’s Digital Learning Team as part of the CABI Academy also provide a range of other services that include consultancy in learning design, as well as platform hosting services.
Using the Skills for Agriculture Framework (SFA) as our base, we can help you to devise a sustainable strategy for training and performance improvement. In addition, our team of user researchers, learning designers, user experience specialists, graphic designers and testers are available to help you create high impact experiences and resources.
The CABI Academy has partnerships with Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture (CNFA), the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, SciDev.Net, East West Seeds Knowledge Transfer and NextGenU.org.
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