Our dairy specialist Lisanne Oskam has been involved in a project called the Bright Future in Agriculture (BFA). It’s a three-year project providing support to the Ethiopian agricultural vocational education sector. The project's main contribution will be to create more opportunities for (youth) employment and hence improve business and value chains in the horticultural and dairy sub-sectors.
Because it’s not possible to travel to Ethiopia currently, the Dairy project team decided to train the dairy teachers of the seven beneficiary colleges online from the Netherlands. The training sessions took place in May and June at the dairy farm EMDIDI in Debre Zeit. We started in May with the Hygienic Milking Training (18-21 May) followed by the four-day Health Management Training in June. The training activities are a mix of virtual sessions with the Dutch trainers and even included an online training session in a Dutch barn with 120 cows. In addition, we work with a local team of experts who facilitate the training on-site. They supervise the practical training courses, which are carried out on the Ethiopian dairy farm. As part of the training, the project team organized visits to local farms in Debre Zeit and carried out practical activities on the farms, where participants performed post- and pre-milking procedures. In addition, during this training session, the project team made company assessments for the validation of the skills forms.
It’s good to see that online training courses worked well in this project as well, and that a blended form of training is an effective and appealing way of conducting training activities in the future.
The next online training event is scheduled for September (Fertility). Until then, the participants will be following an online CowSignal e-learning course that is tailored to their learning needs and supervised by the Dutch trainers. And hopefully we can meet again face-to-face at the end of the year.
For more information, please contact Lisanne Oskam
