(Kinshasa, DR Congo) Korea Institute for Development Strategy (KDS) and the Research and Communication Center for Sustainable Development (Centre de Recherche et de communication en Development Durable: CERED) of Loyola University, undertook the 1st Outsourcing Training of Trainers (ToT) from November 27th to December 15th, 2017as a part of the Project entitled “Capacity Development of National Agricultural Extension Center in DR Congo” (hereafter “the project”, supervised by the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA). The closing ceremony of the training was held on December 15th, 2017, and the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Agriculture Mr. Evariste BUSHABU BOPEMING, the KOICA Country Director Mr. Se Chul OH, the Coordinator of CERED Ghislain TSHIKENDWA MATADI, and other honored guests as well as 30 training participants, have attended in this ceremony and celebrated the participants’ completion of the program.
This ToT program is the 1st training program of the project based on 5 different modules (Understanding of Agricultural Extension, Marketing, Food crops, Horticulture, and Livestock) and the local institute CERED has implemented it as an outsourcing partner of KDS. The training participants - government officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Rural Development - have shown their enthusiasm during the program and were eager to achieve knowledge and techniques for improved agricultural extension service in DR Congo. Consequently, all 30 participants have completed the program with active participation in the courses. In the future, trainees with high performance may be given points to enhance their promotion in affiliated organization and also be selected as subjects for one of the pilot projects – supporting dispatch of the agricultural extension agent – which is one of the components of the project.
Beginning with this training program, one expects more outsourcing Training of Trainers (ToT) program and Training of Leaders (ToL) to be followed in upcoming years.
There will be 3 times of training in 2018 and 4 times in 2019, and the training will be executed in partnership with local training institutes again. The results of this outsourcing training program will be utilized as a valuable reference for developing a curriculum and textbooks for the National Agricultural Extension Center (NAEC), which is planned to be established during the project implementation period.
*** KDS, in consortium with World Canaan Farmers’ Movement (WCM), implements this project for 54 months from 2017, under cooperation with Ministry of Agriculture (MINAGRI) in DR Congo in order to increase the agricultural productivity of Congolese farmers through an establishment of improved agricultural extension system in DR Congo. The project is composed of 1) Construction and rehabilitation of National Agricultural Extension Center (NAEC) for Training of Trainers (ToT) and Training of Leaders (ToL), 2) Development of curriculum and textbooks, 3) Consulting on improved national agricultural extension system and consulting on legislation of NAEC, 4) Establishment of the center operation plan and its capacity building, and 5) ToT, ToL, and technology dissemination projects.