On the third day of the PLEDGE Project launch week, consortium members and partner institutions traded conference rooms for open fields, travelling to Bukalasa Agricultural College to see, first hand, what competency based agricultural training looks like when it has had a century to mature.

A century of practical training

Bukalasa's Principal, Mr. Gelvan Kasolo, welcomed the group with a brief history of the college, established in 1920 and now regarded as one of Uganda's premier hands on agriculture training institutions. Bukalasa delivers competency based learning through demonstration farms, workshops, laboratories, and industry attachments, producing graduates ready for work on farms, in agribusinesses, cooperatives, NGOs, and the public sector.

The college offers two year certificates and diplomas alongside a three year distance diploma in Agriculture and Animal Husbandry designed for working learners, and operates under the joint oversight of the National Council for Higher Education and the Uganda Vocational and Technical Awards Board. Bukalasa graduates roughly 1,500 students every year, a scale that made it a natural reference point for a project built around the idea that theory and practice belong side by side.

Walking the grounds

Guests were taken on a guided tour of the campus, meeting students at work on their own agricultural projects: crop gardens, animal husbandry units, student led innovations and research projects, value addition initiatives, and greenhouses. For a consortium built around the Back to Farmer approach, the visit offered a living example of what PLEDGE's own training centres could look like once established at partner universities.

The day closed with a shared lunch at the college and, in the evening, cultural entertainment and dinner at the Ndere Cultural Centre, where guests were treated to dances representing different parts of the country, a fitting close to a day centred on Uganda's own agricultural heritage.

Why it mattered

The visit gave consortium partners something a presentation cannot: proof that a practical, farm based training model has already worked in Uganda for over a hundred years. As the project moves into establishing its own training centres and university industry councils in coffee, horticulture, and tourism, Bukalasa stands as a homegrown reference point for what sustained, well managed, hands on education can achieve.