FAFS and the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) held a joint virtual open house (April 6) to explore long-term and strategic collaboration opportunities. RUFORUM, a consortium of 129 African universities, operates in 38 countries and spans the African continent. RUFORUM advocates for change in addressing important, but largely unfulfilled, roles of the universities in contributing to the well‐being of small‐scale farmers and economic development of countries across sub‐Saharan Africa. The consortium has several unique features for building Africa's innovation capacity and engaging universities in development process and practice. The virtual open house included a FAFS-RUFORUM partnership discussion platform in which faculty and experts from both institutions presented and discussed their flagship programs, interventions, and success stories and identified complementarity and potential synergies across their portfolios.
RUFORUM's community action research program and Transformative Agenda for Africa's Agriculture (focused on society needs, return on investment, and science and practice) are very much aligned with FAFS versatile Center for Development Studies and the strategic initiative Global Design Teams (GDT), the senior capstone experience focused on service learning for community building. FAFS and RUFORUM will join forces, working across these areas of interest to lay the foundation for a robust, sustainable relationship between both institutions.
