The climax of the PLEDGE Project launch week was the Stakeholders Conference on Competence Based Education and Training, held on the final day at the National Council for Higher Education in Kyambogo. The room brought together Vice Chancellors and Deans of Faculties from universities across Uganda, officials from the Ministries of Education and Agriculture, and representatives of the private sector, all there to discuss one question: how does Uganda move higher education from theory to practice.
A keynote on why agriculture needs to change
The keynote, titled "Best Practices in Competence Based Education," was delivered by Peter Gerstmeier of Triesdorf, Germany, standing in for Professor Ralf Schaulderer. He opened with a demographic warning. The Food and Agricultural Organization projects the world's population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050, and Uganda has one of the youngest and fastest growing populations on the continent, even as land, a resource that cannot be reproduced, grows scarcer. At the same time, young people are leaving rural areas for cities because they see no future on the farm.
His answer was direct: agriculture has to become more profitable, and it has to become an attractive career for young people, not a fallback.
What that looks like in practice
Gerstmeier drew on his own university, the University of Applied Sciences Weihenstephan-Triesdorf, as a working example. Its 1,500 students train on a dairy barn with 120 milking cows, one of Europe's most modern machinery schools with ten combine harvesters, a welding school for farm equipment repair, and projects spanning sheep, poultry, piggery, and apiary production, alongside a milk processing plant. The school does not run these facilities as a demonstration. It runs them as working, profitable farms, because, as he put it, students cannot be trained to be practical and profitable without being shown practically how it is done.
He also described the German dual education system that shaped his own career: a combination of apprenticeship and university study that let him graduate with both a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture and a licensed farmer's certification. This dual model, pairing hands on training centres close to campus with university coursework, is the template PLEDGE intends to bring to its partner institutions.
He pointed to a concrete example of what this looks like when it works: the BASIS project's partnership with the private company Biosyntec, where a group of five students was tasked with identifying the right avocado breed for the region. The industry partner got the breed it needed, the students learned data driven research, and local farmers gained a market for their avocados.
Questions from the floor
The discussion that followed surfaced some of the harder questions Ugandan institutions will need to answer.
John Mugisha, Vice Chancellor of Bishop Stuart University, asked what actually makes someone a "licensed farmer" in the German system, and admitted that many Ugandan university demonstration farms are too small to be profitable. Gerstmeier explained that a licensed farmer completes two years of practical apprenticeship, sits a practical farming exam, then completes two years of theoretical study before certification, and noted that demonstration farms do not need to be large. They need to be well managed and profitable.
Dr. Serwanga Jamil of IUIU raised a cultural obstacle: in many Ugandan schools, farming has historically been used as a punishment, and is seen as work for the poor. He asked how that mindset can shift, especially among children from wealthier families. Gerstmeier noted Germany once held the same attitude, and that the shift came from proving agriculture's profitability and from showcasing excellent, visibly successful farms.
Maal Crispo of African Rural University pushed further, asking how PLEDGE will validate and incorporate the traditional knowledge held by older generations as rural populations age and migrate to cities. The response pointed to PLEDGE's rural university placements and intersectoral working groups designed to bring that knowledge into the process directly. Crispo also asked whether PLEDGE would support dual education models more broadly across Uganda. The project plans to design and deliver around 40 dual courses, extending beyond the consortium's own universities to other interested institutions.
The conversation set the tone for the rest of the day: competence based education is not simply a curriculum change. It is a shift in infrastructure, mindset, and the relationship between universities and the communities they serve.