300 workers trained in agricultural services

Workers harvesting tea. The level of agriculture production has been attributed to  low due to poor quality soils

TRAINING | AGRICULTURE

KAMMPLA - Over 300 newly appointed agricultural extension workers from sub-counties have been recruited for sustainable land management refresher training to improve agricultural extension services.

The course is being undertaken by the department of extension and innovation studies under the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences (CAES), Makerere University with funding from the International Fund for Agriculture Development through the agriculture ministry.

The one-week refresher course is conducted in collaboration with the agriculture ministry and CAES. It is meant to address skills and the knowledge gap in the extensions department, following a needs assessment among extension workers.

According to the needs assessment, it was discovered that a number of newly recruited staffs needed refresher courses to cope with the advancing technology.

The ministry of agriculture has been recruiting staff for the extension department that replaced the National Agriculture Advisory Services (NAADS).

Dr Bernard Oba, the director of Continuing Agricultural Education Centre, said the agriculture ministry identified a number of key areas to be improved. These include sustainable land management, agribusiness development and post-harvest handling technology. Others are agrochemicals, fertiliser use and extension management.

Oba said a number of extension workers were trained before the introduction of the new technologies. He added that CAES has to provide information relevant for improving performance.

"We are supposed to train 300 extension workers .The number is divided into four groups of 75 officers so that at the end of four weeks, we would have trained 300 extension workers," he said.

According to Oba, the level of agriculture production is low due to poor quality soils that do not support crop production. 

Prof. Moses Tenywa from the department of agricultural production and also the co-ordinator of the grants office, said the problem of soil degradation has been persistent despite the efforts.