A Garden Love Affair in Rwanda: Professional Agriculture Skills

The professional agriculture skills class at ASYV was a pleasure to teach this year. There are three professional skills programs at ASYV: modern agriculture, IT and hospitality. The professional skills programs all started this year. The idea is to give the students some hands-on, employable skills other than their high school education.

Senior 5 students preparing their plots for planting

I helped to develop the curriculum for the agriculture professional skills with Gervais, the village agronomist. However, I only started teaching in second term. I split the teaching half and half with Gervais. Both senior 6 (grade 12) and senior 5 (grade 11) took the class this year. The class was four hours every week for each grade. It was broken up into two days (with two hours of instruction each day). Senior 6 finished their professional skills at the end of second term, so I had less time with them.

Some of my favourite people were with me in professional skills program. I can honestly say that these students are models of the ASYV core values (integrity, respect, role model, learning community, commitment, support and interest of the child) and they will go far!

Mulching the plots

I tried to make the classes as interactive and hands on as possible. The students take these classes after lunch, after being in school from 7am until 2pm. I know that Rwandans have an amazing amount of patience and ability to sit still and listen- but there's no need to bore them with lectures after being in school all day. We covered many of my favourite topics like permaculture, agroforetry, seed saving, nursery care, compost, swales, irrigation, greenhouses etc.

Planting seeds in their plots

The following are some pictures from the year. I didn't bring my camera to all the classes so it's just a small sample of the year.

The first field trip to an agricultural fair near Kigali.

Learning about different cultivars of sorghum

Admiring the giant cassava roots

What? You made this out of poo? Humanure compost booth

Part of the group at the fair

Learning about greenhouses and drip irrigation systems.

Learning about the properties of greenhouses

Hooking up the irrigation to the rain water tank

Multi level learning

Setting up the drip irrigation

More pictures from ASYV learning how to use an A-frame to mark out a swale.

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The second field trip was to Sina Gerard's agri-business in Nyirangarama. His business is located half way between Kigali and Musanze, the headquaters to all mountain gorilla activities. Pretty much every bus stops there to take a break for the 3 hour drive. This is one of those successfully business models where he started small, making bread, with one employee and now has over 400 employees, with many value added products like bread, jams, fruit juice, chilli sauce, meat, banana wine, banana beer, etc. He also has built an elementry and high school for the community and a carpentry school. His most famous products are juice concentrates and a chili sauce. He started making these value added products and getting the farmers around him to grow these products for him to process. He has many other products but one of the interesting things you will see in these next pictures is that he tries new things. Many farmers in Rwanda grow the same thing as their neighbours- and for good reason, they mostly grow staple crops that they and their community will consume. However, if you are trying to make a business out of it- it is a good idea to try new things, to find the niche market.