The Past Few Weeks

A few weeks ago I had a great discussion about international agricultural and extension education with another EIME student, Moses Khombe. A few years ago, with funding and support from NuSkin, Moses co-founded an agriculture technical school in the village of Mtalimanja in his home country of Malawi. This school has about 10 faculty and 70 students in a 2-year program. I expressed to Moses my interest in studying the educational aspects of agricultural extension in developing countries and he got me in contact with the Dr. Evans Chipala, director of the school, called the School of Agriculture for Family Independence (SAFI). Dr. Chipala expressed interest in collaborating on educational research questions at his school. The trick now is fine tuning a research question and objective that fulfills my passion and still serves the best interest of the school. This shouldn't be too hard, since my passion is understanding and improving agricultural extension education in developing countries and the goal of SAFI is "teaching Malawi farmers to thrive, not just survive, on their small farms" (Nourish the Children, Global Destination Report, NuSkin, Jan. 2008).

At the same time I have been developing a relationship with Moses and Dr. Chipala, I have also been working with Dr. Leigh Smith in the Department of Teacher Education here at BYU. Dr. Smith specializes in teacher perception studies and qualitative research, an area of educational research I find particularly interesting. We have begun meeting weekly to discuss writing a MEG grant proposal to do research at SAFI. Through our first discussion last week, we realized that we know very little about the state of agricultural extension in Africa - and Malawi especially. So, for the past week, I have been intensively scouring the literature to get a better holistic view of the situation. Lucky for us, there is a Journal of International Agricultural and Extension Education where much has been published in the past 20 years about this topic. I have a much better understanding today about the state of agriculture research and extension education in Africa than I did 6 days ago, though very little is written about Malwai itself.