Fanshawe Global makes its first mission to Kenya

Fanshawe Global team members Amanda Dooney and Tracy Gedies traveled to Friends College Kaimosi in Kenya to provide capacity building training for trainers (e.g., syllabus preparation, authentic evaluation and lesson plans) delivering the curricula at Technical and Vocational Education and Training Authority (TVETA) in both Food Processing Technology and Agriculture Extension.

An important theme of the project is collaboration and fostering new and existing partnerships with fellow departments, industries, businesses, and other local vocational training institutions. Team-led brainstorming sessions explored how crops and livestock products grown by Agriculture students could provide the raw materials required by Food Processing students in their newly equipped labs and how both courses could generate income by selling what was grown or processed in their curriculum enabling them to re-invest those funds and purchase additional equipment and resources. Other collaborative endeavours included hosting a very successful Industrial Advisory Committee meeting and visiting local mentee institutions to view their course offerings and discuss ways to collaborate and support each other. The team also held multiple gender-focused workshops that included meeting with the Gender Committees at Friends College Kaimosi and Sang’alo Institute of Science and Technology, and both student and trainer focus groups.

Image

Testimonial from Amanda Dooney - PT Faculty, Agribusiness Management, Fanshawe College, Simcoe Campus
"As someone who has a passion for teaching, travel, agriculture and above all - meeting new people, I was very fortunate to combine all of these passions and have the opportunity to work on a TVETA curriculum development project and travel to Kenya in November 2022 with Fanshawe Global.

Working with the enthusiastic team of trainers (teachers) in the Agriculture Extension Program at Friends College Kaimosi in Kenya has been an amazing and impactful experience for me. I was able to travel to Kenya, tour their beautiful college campus and meet them in person, where together we shared our ideas, knowledge and passion for teaching and student success. I loved leading multiple engaging brainstorming sessions where it was very exciting to see the trainers come up with new ideas and work on collaborating and fostering relationships and partnerships with other departments within the college such as Food Processing, as well as other local institutions and businesses to support their students as they launch their new Agriculture Curriculum. Through this project I have now made lifelong friends and we continue to stay in touch over WhatsApp as we share updates on life in Canada and Kenya with each other. As a team, we feel the importance of encouraging young people to study and become involved in the agricultural sector, as a very fulfilling and secure form of employment - one where you are growing and providing food to your local community. After all, we all need to eat!"

To learn more about this project, contact Candace Miller at cmmiller@fanshawec.ca.