Dear Members,
First of all, I appreciate all your genuine ideas, experiences and views forwarded for online discussion on the aforementioned topics.
I have tried to go through with all your ideas and I am very happy to see almost all of you are supporting the ideas of integrating nutrition in to the curricula of agricultural education institutions. I would like also to appreciate those of you who contributed supporting documents in the areas of nutrition agriculture linkage focusing on human resource development in the areas of nutrition sensitive agriculture.
I want to quote one of our colleagues' ideas mentioning the importance of integrating nutrition in the curricula of agriculture as "I think now it becomes clear that unless agriculture of a community is guided by its actual nutritional needs, it would be impossible to avoid either malnutrition or its inappropriate counterpart" [Lal Manavado]. I also strongly agree with this idea. This may answer questions of members who raise its worthiness to do so.
When we say integrating nutrition in the curricula of agriculture education we do not mean that all agricultural graduates will be nutritionist or agricultural professionals will not replace the role of nutritionist. We are saying that agricultural professionals should have basic nutrition knowledge so as to promote nutrition sensitive agriculture. We may not expect from agricultural professional to be competent with detail nutrition skills like those of nutritionist.
Let me share our experience of integrating nutrition in to the curricula of agricultural education. The most important activity that we have to do first is that identifying nutrition core competencies that is relevant for agricultural professional.
Nutrition core competencies we identified for agriculture professionals are listed below: All the listed core competencies are described with their attributes in terms of knowledge, skill and attitude competency domains.
- Apply basic principles of human nutrition
- Assist in a variety of agricultural food production and promote use of diversified/complementary foods
- Promote safe handling of agricultural food products during storage, transportation and preservation
- Promote nutrition through Behaviour Change Communication(BCC) and use of technology
- Utilize multi-sectoral collaboration and linkage
- Plan manage, monitor and evaluate agriculture-related nutrition interventions
- Apply professionalism and ethics
The challenge we faced at the beginning was how to integrate those nutrition core competencies in to the existing curricula of agricultural education. As we all know curriculum revision requires a great deal with decision makers and it needs long period of time. To escape these long process, add-on approach i.e integrating the identified nutrition core competencies within the existing potential curriculum of agriculture education was the first option that we followed. Throughout all these process, all the essential stakeholders like MOA, MOH, MOE and other stakeholders were consulted.
Is it possible to address those nutrition core competencies with add-on approach or with extra lecture hours? As it was raised by Jane Sherman [participant to the discussion], this is the most important point that should be answered. Of course, now the Ministry of Agriculture(MoA) endorsed nutrition to be one of Occupational Standard (OS) for mid-level agricultural graduates and we are also working with Ministry of Education (MoE) to do the same for university agricultural graduates.
Having said this much about our experiences, I would like to request members to share their experiences and thought with specific to each leading questions listed under the discussion topics.
Mebit Kebede
Jhpiego Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Mr. Mebit Kebede