Enhancing the Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources (AFNR) higher education programs in the Philippines

Agriculture, forestry and natural resources are still the major sectors of employment and income generation in the Philippines. There are over a hundred State Universities and Colleges (SUCs) offering courses and degree programs in agriculture and forestry whose graduates work in government service, private companies and AFNR [agroforestry and natural resources] based-industries. However, in the last decade, the enrollment of students in SUCs had declined, threatening the supply of professional agriculturists and forestry experts, field practitioners and skilled farm, forest and fishery workers needed to sustain the productivity and development in these vital sectors of the Philippine economy. To curb this trend, a national program on 'Enhancing the Demand for AFNR graduates through Science and Technology' was launched in 2008. Its most important objective was to provide support to entrepreneurship development and employment generation in selected SUCs so that agriculture, fisheries and forestry graduates will have viable alternative options to the traditional employment route. While most AFNR graduates are generally well trained for jobs in government service, the private sector and the academe, the same cannot be said for the entrepreneurship route, which directly promotes self-employment and the development of new agro forest and food-based industries, but did not receive as much attention in the past. The two-year national program addresses this gap by providing direct interventions to SUCs that hopefully improve teaching-learning facilities and strengthen the capacity of AFNR faculties to design more business-oriented curricula and attract students willing to venture in their own agroforest or food-based enterprises upon graduation. The basic model of the program is SUC-based and student/graduate-centered but numerous innovative institutional modalities exist in the training and immersion of students in educational income generating projects (e-IGPs) and technopreneurial learning projects (TLPs). Initiating new public-private partnership arrangements, inter-SUC, multi-agency and consortium alliance approaches to enhancing the development of micro, small and medium (MSME) scale S and T-based enterprises for AFNR graduates are also an integral part of the program. Some examples of innovations are the regional-priority commodity-specific value-chain based strategies to immersing students in entrepreneurship and the establishment of Agri and Food-based Technology Business Incubators (TBI) in selected SUCs. This paper describes the key features and activities of the program as implemented in over 60 High Education Institutions (HEIs) spread put across the 14 regions of the Philippines. It also documents the full range of processes, interventions, approaches and institutional arrangements initiated by implementing SUCs. Finally, it identifies early lessons learned about important factors that contribute to the success of MSME S and T-based industries under different regional settings.