Advancing Sustainable Agricultural Value Chains through Strengthening Transdisciplinary Skills and Cooperation in East African Doctoral Education
Co-funded by the
Erasmus+ Programme
of the European Union
Advancing Sustainable Agricultural Value Chains through Strengthening Transdisciplinary Skills and Cooperation in East African Doctoral Education
Co-funded by the
Erasmus+ Programme
of the European Union
ADVALUE aims to modernise doctoral programs in agricultural and environmental related sciences, by introducing innovative courses in transdisciplinary research methods and value chain approaches. This objective is targeted in Work Package 4 (WP4) – “Development of Advanced PhD Modules”.
The content of four different PhD modules is developed in specific Module Working Groups through physical and online meetings, study trips, pilot trainings and stakeholder communication. Topics of high regional, as well as global, relevance are identified and approached from a transdisciplinary point of view. Learning methodologies are jointly developed in order to meet the needs of East African partners. The pilot testing of the new modules will be held at the two Kenyan and two Ugandan Universities participating in the project.
After evaluating the new courses, they can be included in about 30 running degree-programmes at these four partner East African universities.
Moreover, the experience exchange and dissemination by actively participating network partners opens up a broader adaptation and long-term sustainability of the project’s outputs.
The module includes the following topics: • research design and data management• literature research• scientific and target-group oriented publication• ethics in Scientific research• case examples of scientific working methods in emerging areas
This module examines transdisciplinary research, including the following topics:• introduction to transdisciplinarity in the field of sustainability research• introduction to systems thinking and systems approaches• agricultural and food systems conceptualised as social-ecological system• basics in community-based research, stakeholder involvement, communication• participatory tools for collecting, processing and analysing data
This module is based on sustainable rangeland resource management, including the following topics: • climate change impacts on animal husbandry and rangeland management • the value-chain approach in livestock-sector development • development and use of ICT in mobile pastoral livestock production • environmental assessment methods for rangeland resources • livestock infectious disease
This Module is focused on Sustainable Agricultural Value Chain Development, including the following topics: • climate change impacts on agricultural crops and commodities • introduction to value-chain approaches for agricultural biologicals • agricultural market linkages analysis and development • agricultural Value Chain (AVC) financing and governance • AVC project development and implementation cycle • gender mainstreaming in AVC
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