While we all know Agriculture employs 60% of Uganda’s population, lack of enough knowledge, skills and market presence still presents quite a vast challenge.
Recently, the Agribusiness Development Centre (ADC) unveiled an e-learning portal for stakeholders in the green business economy focusing on Agriculturists so as to enhance the capacity of small hold farmers in the value chain of; Coffee, Cocoa, Serials, Diary among other sections of the Agricultural economy.
The E-learning portal will act as training channel for farmers across the different regions of Uganda covering languages such as Luganda, Luo and Runyakitara while more will be availed on the platform at a later stage. The platform offers a unique opportunity for user interface making it convenient to navigate through.
Inaugurated in 2017, the Agribusiness Development Centre has so far trained and equipped financial literacy, market presence and skills knowledge to 114 farmer based organisations with close to 8,042 farmers in East, West, Central and Northern region across the Country while it aims to train more 375 farmer based organisations by 2022 with the SOMA E-learning portal.
SOMA is an E-learning platform that was developed based on an identified E-learning gap mismatch between demand of learning services and the capacity of ADC to match this demand in the physical and high cost of carrying out one on one classroom trainings for individual farmer s, while developing, E-learning provides an opportunity to bridge the gap between demand and supply of the ADC technical services at a cost-effective way designed to be self-based learning where members can access the system, register for accounts and chose any courses of self-demand.
Mr Obuk Emmanuel, ADC General Manager reveals that, ‘’the E-learning portal was inaugurated to offer financial literacy training, market acquisition skills among other related farming training to small scale farmers for good governance and development of Uganda’s food basket and back bone stakeholders in the different key focus categories in their unique regions.
He adds that,’’ this platform is prospected to cut down face to face training costs per head from $100 to $0.5 per individual per training. Through this we will partner with Government so as to tap into its infrastructure and also to enable people without smart gadgets to access the portal at no cost. Also farmers will be able to access remotely with the use of interactive voice response (IVR) for those that can’t get close to smart gadget s while those that can access the portal will also be helped with the use of Artificial Intelligence systems or Chatbot for quick help as certificates will be awarded at the end of the E-Course’’.
However, this project covers a five year period intervention with funding partners; dfcu bank and Rabo foundation based in the Netherlands.
The ADC plans to have learning hubs across in different farmer based organizations where farmers can be able to embark on some lessons during their own time of convenience, in other wards – when farmer registers for a lesson and starts learning, the system offers the learner resume capabilities meaning they can always pause and resume from where they last stopped.
Farmers can access E-learning via https://www.soma.adc.ug/
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