Agrinovia Master Training

Lead Organization:

Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo (UJK-Z)

Partner Organizations:

NGOs, associations, projects, and professional structures (public or private sector companies) that welcome students on internship

Financial partners Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS) and FONER (national fund for education and research)

Technical and/or scientific partners Università of Roma Tre (Italy), Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), Senghor University in Alexandria (Egypt), Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France), Université Peleforo Gon Coulibaly de Korhogo (Ivory Coast), Abdou Moumouni University (Niger), University of Abomey-Calavi (Benin), Agreenium (France), Fert (Burkina Faso), CORADE training and consulting agency (Burkina Faso), CPF (farmers confederation of Burkina Faso), DIOBASS Ecology and Society (Burkina Faso), TRIAS (Burkina Faso), Project Neer-Tamba (Burkina Faso), CIRADE (Ouagadougou), dP/ASAP CIRDES (Bobo-Dioulasso), Inter-réseaux (Ouagadougou), and Terre des hommes, ONG Suisse (Ouagadougou)

Community of Practice:

West Africa

Countries:

Burkina Faso

Duration:

5/2023—5/2024

Overview:

Agrinovia is a graduate and professional training program focused on innovation, partnership, and rural development in Africa. It aims to prepare a new generation of field agents with technical and socioeconomic skills to work with rural communities on local innovation dynamics and to build partnerships and networks of actors.

Created in 2011, the program involves three months of intensive classroom courses at Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo and a compulsory internship in rural areas with partner institutions (NGOs, POs, development projects), at the end of which a thesis is expected. In recent years, however, some students encountered supervision and financial difficulties in completing their internships.

Agrinovia thus organized an internship preparation workshop late January 2023 that allowed development operators, NGOs, and farmers’ organizations offering internships to discuss with students which concerns/topics to research. Students inform partners of their choices, find supervisors, and speak with professors to get direction.

The workshop covers Agrinovia internship ethical guidelines. It is not a question of going into the field to extort data from farmers and associates via purely academic appropriation, but of inscribing a research project in a learning process of proximity with producers and other stakeholders. Here, behavioral skills are often more important.

Grant Aims:

Based on the ideas of innovation and partnership, the overall goal is to provide stakeholders with useful research syntheses for solving the problems facing rural communities.

Specifically, the project aims to:

  1. Support students and enable their success by monitoring their internships.
  2. Increase the visibility of student research results by making them available to public and private university libraries as well as to development operators, NGOs, and associations active in the field.

Outputs and Outcomes:

Outputs and Outcomes:

  • Explicit contract signed between the organization, Agrinovia coordinator, student, and thesis supervisor
  • Projects, NGOs, or other structures unable to attend the workshop send document indicating research concerns they would like to see students address
  • At least three main meetings expected between the student and supervision team: orientation, mid-term, and internship validation and data collection
  • At end of the process, thesis director/supervisor produces discharge authorizing student to submit thesis for defense; students not ready for the first session must wait for the second and last session the next academic year to defend their research