By Lucy Kanu | Executive Director
From the Classroom to the Field: Mentoring by Doing!
The 3rd and 4th quarter of 2015 is dedicated to Agriculture and Hands on Mentoring by Doing. The spotlight is on Ms Jacinta Uramah –a 2009 Mentee who is totally sold out to Greening School Grounds and is taking our public school students out into the fields to learn about how to secure their Livelihoods and indeed their futures through Entrepreneurial Agriculture.
The mentoring challenge story of Jacinta Uramah has been more that eventful since it started. She chose a unique path of mentoring young students in agriculture by providing classroom sessions in our 2nd quarter review and in this 3rd quarter has progressed into the hands-on skills training in school vegetable gardening.
All the sessions leading to the practical’s were carried out during school mentoring club hours and skill building activities demonstrating and explaining practically, the how/why/what of vegetable gardening to students. The gardens were fertilized in organic manure and protected from pests with Moringa plants around the beds. Vegetables grown on their gardens ranged from Spinach (Efo), Pumpkin leaves, water leaves, lettuce, spring onions and (Corchorus Olitorius). The platform of Mentoring Challenge led (brand new) green clubs and in some schools, pre-existing young farmers clubs averaged the participation of 20 students.
What Next?
Jacinta’s passion and commitment to the Mentoring Challenge project has led to the launch of a full-scale Agro/Environmental endeavour tagged “The Green Generation”. This is targeted at grooming young agricultural students to become thought provoking leaders that will shape the future of agriculture.
Since her taking up the Mentoring Challenge in 2013, she has mentored 10 secondary schools in Lagos state, directly affecting over 300 students and more than 1,000 students indirectly by virtue of being within the school communities where new learnings is demonstrated by growing vegetables, creating excitement among students and challenging young entrepreneurial minds.
Using a “catch them young” strategy, she has mobilized several cohorts of students into school agricultural clubs across the 10 schools. This strategy gives hands-on skills in 4 major areas: school beautification, school gardens “growing vegetables”, soil protection, conservation practices, and soil restoration. These hand-on skills when horned and taken to practice, will effectively contribute to the reduction in youth unemployment, environmental improvement and promote youth involvement in agricultural production.
Her participation in the Mentoring Challenge has gained her a livelihood and professional recognition –noting that she enlisted on the challenge straight out of university. Ms Uramah has secured a partnership with Osun State University, Nigeria funded by IDRC/DFAT, a Canadian research organization to reach over 200 schools within Southwestern Nigeria within the next 3 years in agricultural training, mentoring, and growing vegetable gardens. She aspires to directly impact at least 10,000young students through this platform.
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