In its efforts to develop a new Agribusiness Programme, the Dominica State College (DSC) at a press conference on Friday, announced its partnership with the universities of Guelph and Dalhousie both from Canada.
The programme is being facilitated by the CARICOM Education for Employment (C-EFE) project and funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
The DSC Agribusiness Programme will be developed over a 3 year period ending 2016, at a cost of four hundred and forty thousand Canadian dollars.
DSC President, Dr. Donald Peters remarked on how the programme connects with the vision of the Dominica State College.
“Levels of skill and education are vital components of the skills race and will increasingly determine the economic fortunes of many countries. So if we in Dominica believe that we can put out students with 6 CXC subjects and tell them to build a nation- it will not happen. You need skills, and not very many skills are being taught from Primary to Secondary School, so the College has a very unique position where it is able to train the bulk of the population as they leave high school for employment in the future.”
He further stated, “The state college is the best institution in the country and works with global universities. Today I received an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) from St. Georges University agreeing to take all our credits for our students who want to transfer to [that] university. Earlier this year we signed an MOU with the University of Arkansas and that means that if these major universities across the globe recognize that the Dominica State Colleges’ credits are acceptable to them [then] we have crossed the barrier and shifted the paradigm.”
The programme aims to enable learners to develop skills required by the labour market as well as increase opportunities for mobility across the CARICOM region.
According to the Dominica State College, the partnership is aimed at developing Vocational Programmes in Agriculture and ensuring that graduates of the programme are able to operate at a supervisory level and create self employment.
Dean in the Faculty of Education, Merrill Matthew indicated, “At the heart of the project is the need for the region and for the College to move away from the traditional academic supply driven programmes to one which is demand-driven, where the focus is on the learners and what they need.”
His colleague, Dean in the Faculty of Applied Arts, Rawle Leslie reiterated,
“We realized that many of our graduates may not find jobs in the industry and we want to train our graduates in this field so that they can be Entrepreneurs themselves, they can identify a project and start their own business.”
Representative of Dalhousie University, Nancy Thornton, expounded on the project’s focus. “This project is going to focus on training, we’re going to be looking at labour market intelligence and how this can feed into new programs; Competency Based Education Training; Curriculum Development and Design and prior Learning Assessment And Recognition. These will all be different training modules that will occur over the life of the project. We will be helping the Dominica State College strengthen the linkages that they have with industry that are already very linked but we think that there’s always areas for improvement so we’ll support them in that; and we’re also accompanying them in seeking NVQ (National Vocational Qualification) and CVQ (Caribbean Vocational Qualification) accreditation for the new programme that they develop in Agribusiness. Throughout the project as well we’ll be looking at cross-cutting themes which include gender equality; how this project can promote gender equality in Dominica and within the Dominica State College; we’ll be looking at environmental sustainability to make sure that the project is promoting that as well as entrepreneurship.”
She noted that the programme will include the exchange of instructors and students between Canada, Dominica and the region.
“We foresee the mobility of students and instructors from Dominica coming to Canada as well as Canadian students and instructors coming here; there will also be regional movement [for meetings and workshops].”
Merrill Matthew was pleased to announce that the program is available to every Dominican who is interested.
“When the program is complete we will have a vocational qualification programme in agribusiness, this is available to every Dominican, it will not only be for the traditional secondary school student but it will be open to the farmers who want to come in. They may decide whether they want to do the entire qualification or whether they want to do units within the qualification. It is open across the board so that persons of all ages can benefit from it. The critical thing about the programme is that we are no longer asking a student who goes to an interview to say ‘this is what I have’, this programme will enable the student to go to an interview and say, ‘this is what I can do’; the emphasis is on what the person can do and that is why we are going the Vocational Qualification route.”