Article by Edin Simms

This month, innovATE spoke with Charles Maguire, an international development consultant and former senior institutional development specialist at the World Bank.

Charles Maguire has had a long, influential career working as a champion for agricultural education and training. An Ireland native, he grew up in a small village where farming was the main source of livelihood. His connection to the land was further cemented by his typical, rural Irish upbringing which involved sports, fishing, and hunting small game. Earlier this month, Maguire spoke with Edin Simms, innovATE program coordinator, about his career and perspective on international development today.

innovATE: When in your life were you first exposed to poverty and food insecurity?

Maguire: I saw poverty first hand in rural Ireland, where it was difficult to make a living from smallholdings on marginal land. It was at a time when prices for agricultural products were low, and emigration was often the only option for many young, rural people. I learned from the rural poor that there were few complaints and people conducted themselves with dignity and pride. I encountered poverty in many parts of the world later in my working life and found the same level of dignity, despite material shortages.

innovATE: How did you become involved in capacity building for agricultural education and training institutions to effect change in countries facing food insecurity?

Maguire: During my career at the World Bank, I worked on many projects all over the world that included training components to help increase productivity and management skills. After some years I realized that, despite the investments in training, positive results were often hard to document.

It became clear that we needed to build the capacity of programs to produce graduates who could provide guidance and leadership to a wide variety of stakeholders. This began my advocacy for institutional capacity building and improved human resource management in public sector ministries of agriculture.

innovATE: In 2000, you prepared a paper for a World Bank workshop in Africa titled Agricultural Education in Africa: Managing Change. Fourteen years later, do you think the landscape for agricultural education and training institutions has improved to allow these institutions to effectively negotiate change in their environment?

Maguire: There is definitely a greater awareness of the need for change in agricultural education and training institutions and, thankfully, agencies such as USAID are again investing in both human resource development and institutional change. However, there is a serious shortage of local champions on the agricultural education and training landscape, and an unfortunate governance situation.

Most agricultural education and training is in the public sector, and typically, higher agricultural education is managed by ministries of education while lower-level certificate programs, farmer training centers, and in-service training for staff, are supervised by ministries of agriculture. The practical implication of this split governance is that both ministries lack, respectively, the agricultural or educational capacity to effectively manage their institutions.

innovATE: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing agricultural education institutions today? How can we start tackling this challenge?

Maguire: Agriculture programs do not have the agility to address modern challenges, including the impacts of climate change, feeding increasingly large urban populations, arresting the decline of natural resources, offering the soft skills needed by employers, and facing the unworkable governance situation in which most agricultural institutions operate.

Programs need to be more imaginatively designed to attract high-achieving students from the secondary education stream; and policymakers must have a better understanding of the role played by these programs in national development.

innovATE: Another challenge you cited in your Agricultural Education in Africa: Managing Change paperwas the shift in focus from rural development to agricultural development. Can you explain this shift and how it impacts agricultural education and training?

Maguire: The rural space is dynamic, and while agriculture may be the engine of economic activity, it depends on those who live there to provide labor and services, and to make a decent livelihood. Many times, investments focus on agriculture, whether it is on research, extension or specific crop or animal production. These actions are in most cases useful, but do not encompass the wider rural space and create beneficial links between rural development and agricultural development. The impact on education and training is that curricula are too narrowly focused and do not connect agriculture and its impact on rural people and the rural way of life.

innovATE: In 2012, you wrote a paper for USAID titled Building the Base for Global Food Security – Agricultural Education and Training, which set the stage for the innovATE project. In the paper, you ask whether agricultural education and training systems in countries are truly “systems.” Can you discuss this?

Maguire: I like to think of systems as being composed of elements that are in a continuous state of information exchange. Agricultural education and training systems, because of the governance issues already mentioned and isolation from stakeholders, do not share information on a regular basis. Higher agricultural education is often disconnected from technician education and training, from farmer and ministry in-service training, and from stakeholder advice. Because of this, opportunities are lost to better understand education and training needs; to infuse programs with new knowledge; to improve teaching and learning skills and outcomes; and to enable them to reflect united professional strength.

innovATE: You talk about how the Green Revolution in the 60’s and 70’s kept the population from outstripping food and other resources. Are we in need of another revolution?

Maguire: I don’t believe we need another revolution because I think that the revolution is already here. Agricultural education and training is faced with technology advances, external threats to natural resources, an array of communications tools to enhance teaching and learning, a shortage of the best quality young people enrolling in agricultural programs, new demands for a different type of graduate on the part of employers, and the continuing growth of world population. But we can meet these challenges. The question is:  have we the courage and the capacity to join the revolution or will we lose relevance while others lead the way?