This Fall 2015, InnovATE teamed up with Agrilinks, a knowledge-sharing portal for food security and agriculture professionals, to put the spotlight on agricultural education and training (AET). In October, our collaboration was initiated with a blog series introducing AET as a concept and showing why it is so important. Continue reading
Updates
Interesting happenings
InnovATE Staff Attend APLU Capacity Development “Deep Dive”
Dr. Keith Moore, Director of InnovATE, and Johanna Cricenti, Program Manager of InnovATE, attended the Association for Public Land Grant Universities’ (A
PLU) workshop, “Institutional Performance Improvement in Practice: A Deep Dive into the HICD Methodology” September 24-25, 2015 in Washington, D.C. The workshop provided an overview of USAID’s human and institutional capacity development (HICD) framework and its basis in human performance technology. Participants also received practical advice on how to incorporate the framework into international projects. A round-table discussion provided an opportunity to share experiences and explore possibilities for collaboration between universities and other development partners.
Rural Sociological Society Society (RSS) Annual Meeting
August 6-9, 2015
RSS hosted their annual meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. The theme of the meeting was “Knowing Rural.” Dr. Keith M. Moore presented on the Educational Programs and Interventions in Rural Settings panel. View his presentation here: Quality Assurance in African Agricultural Education and Training.
Association for International Agriculture and Rural Development (AIARD) Annual Conference
May 31- June 2, 2015
AIARD is hosting their 51st annual conference in Washington D.C. on “Fostering Innovation in International Agriculture and Rural Development.” For more information and registration visit their website.
Tropical Agricultural Platform (TAP) – Capacity Development Expert Group Workshop
March 19-21, 2015 Montpellier, France
A group of experts was sequestered for a two-day workshop to set up a TAP framework for assessing the needs for and develop ways to meet needs for agriculture innovations systems capacity development.
See the TAP Workshop Agenda here.
See key concepts and definitions used at the workshop here.
Investigating agricultural education in Post-Soviet Tajikistan
By: Laina Schneider
Landlocked high in the Pamir mountain range of Central Asia is a country which often appears on lists of the least visited places on earth. Tajikistan is wedged between western China and Afghanistan, and was the poorest republic of the Soviet Union. Following independence in 1991, while former Soviet neighbors made great economic strides, the country was engaged in a civil war which lasted through the 1990s. Continue reading
InnovATE welcomes Dr. Keith M. Moore as Interim Director
Dr. Keith M. Moore began his career at Virginia Tech in 1994 managing projects on natural resource management in West Africa and pest management in the Ukraine for what was then known as the Office of International Development. Dr. Moore has more than 30 years of worldwide experience in the design, implementation, and analysis of agricultural and natural resource-based projects and policies. He has conducted over 70 Short-Term Technical Assistance and Collaborative Research Missions for USAID, IFAD and FAO, and has coordinated the development of core training for agriculture- and natural resource-sector staff in the World Bank. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political economy from the University of California at Santa Cruz, a master’s degree in rural development from The Hague, Netherlands, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Moore’s expertise is in rural development policy, project monitoring and evaluation, conflict management, and gender issues. He has served as the performance assessment director for InnovATE and as a PI on scoping visits to Armenia, Uganda and the DRC.