In honor of World Teachers’ Day, USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service is celebrating some of our fellowship recipients who are teaching agricultural education in Ghana and helping shape the minds of tomorrow’s agricultural producers, entrepreneurs, and global leaders.
USDA’s connection to agricultural education can be traced back more than a century through partnerships with our nation’s land-grant institutions and youth extension programmes, including 4-H and National FFA. More recently, a new USDA programme, the International Agricultural Education Fellowship Programme (IAEFP), was established in 2018 to further strengthen this connection by assisting developing countries with establishing school-based agricultural and youth extension programs.
During their first 4-H meeting, students come together to discuss their goals and expectations for the year.
Today, in close collaboration with Texas A&M University’s Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture, the first-ever cohort of IAEFP Fellows is on the ground in Ghana working in rural communities to help establish and teach agricultural education programmes. The nine US fellows are spending 10 months in host communities working as agriculture teachers, extension agents, and 4-H advisors. Along the way, they are receiving continued training and support from the Borlaug Institute, Vivayic, Inc., 4-H Ghana, and AgriCorps.
Despite their busy teaching schedules, three of the fellows recently squeezed in a few minutes to talk with us about their passion for teaching and agriculture, as we geared up to celebrate them and their colleagues on this World Teachers’ Day.
