Dairychain summer school

DAIRYCHAIN held its first Summer School from 27th July to 2nd August, 2014 at Egerton University. It is through summer schools that the project will be able to strengthen capacity of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in Eastern and Western Africa to enhance efficiency in the Dairy Value Chain (DVC). A total of three summer schools in each of the partner institutions are envisaged. In the first summer school, a .total of twenty three participants drawn from all the partnering universities attended.

Six presentations were made. The first presentation was on “Value Chain Theory and Methodology”aimed at enabling the participants define the concept of value chain and understand the “new” framework for chain empowerment.

The presentation covered an overview of the value chain system from suppliers to consumers, the flow of products, benefits and information in a value chain, creation of added value, calculation of value chain marketing sytem, characteristics of value chains, layers of value chain, value chain framework and the human value chain role play.The second presentation focused on “Dairy Value Chain Management”. It entailed two modules namely value chain mapping and the chain map analysis.

“Competence Based Learning (CBL) in Higher Education” was the third presentation.Several observations were made during this presentation which included; the need to adapt the CBL to fit our own scenarios, the student-lecturer ratio, the demand of the sector (economy) of graduates and farmers were seen as being partners of the CBL.

The fourth presentation focused on “Labour Market Needs Assessment and Sets of Competencies”. It was observed that the curriculum provides in all cases lots of theory with lack of or minimal practical training to complement the theory. It was also observed that hardly any attention is provided towards the informal part of the dairy sector. Dr. Ambula presented sets of competences required and the reasons for the need to shift from traditional to competency based learning.