University of Saskatchewan agriculture student Karlah Rudolph has always had the travel bug.
The fourth-year soil science major has visited the United States, the Cook Islands, the Turks and Caicos, Italy and Australia. This spring, she travelled to Ethiopia, where she hoped to learn more about agriculture in one of the world’s poorest nations.
“I’m excited about it and I’m a bit nervous,” said Rudolph, one of six
U of S students who left for the northeastern African nation in early May to spend a month there.
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“This will be my first time in a country where there is some civil unrest and extreme poverty, so it should be very interesting. It’s going to be a fantastic experience.”
Rudolph received the chance to study in Ethiopia thanks to an international development project that is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency and administered by the U of S.
The project gives a handful of U of S students a chance to study in Africa but its larger purpose is to expand agriculture programming at Debub University in Awassa, one of the major cities in Ethiopia.
Agriculture students enrolled at Debub can study only at the undergraduate level. If they want to acquire a master’s degree or a PhD, they must study at a foreign university, most likely in Europe or North America.
Mike Grevers, a soil science professor at the University of Saskatchewan, said many Ethiopian students have studied at the U of S during the past decade and most have acquired graduate degrees.
Often, however, those students stay in Canada after they graduate and their knowledge does not benefit Ethiopia.
“In essence, the Ethiopian visitors have become educated but the country itself hasn’t benefited,” said Grevers, who acts as director of the CIDA project.
“The goal of this project is really to help to build the college’s capacity to educate Ethiopian students at the graduate level.”
Grevers said Ethiopia faces many challenges when it comes to agricultural production.
Most crops are grown in the country’s central and western regions where the soil is rich, the elevation varied and annual rainfall abundant.
In these areas, particularly in the Great Rift Valley, deforestation and intensive cropping have contributed to a serious erosion problem.
“There’s a massive amount of land degradation going on in Ethiopia,” Grevers said.
“There’s erosion from water, there’s overgrazing and the country is facing a big population increase. It’s not a good situation.”
Another challenge is the lack of transportation.
Investment in the country’s infrastructure would allow primary producers to move their crops more efficiently and gain access to foreign markets.
In an effort to address these problems, the Ethiopian government is promoting education and encouraging research in areas such as sustainable land management and transportation economics.
It is also establishing a network of rural training centres that will eventually be staffed by Ethiopian students who have studied agriculture at the postgraduate level.
“The country has a huge potential to be self sufficient in food production,” Grevers said.
“What they need is help managing and conserving their land resources and training their farmers about sustainable production.”
Angela Taylor has also visited Ethiopia as part of the CIDA project.
The U of S student travelled there as a student in 2002 and then returned on a six-month teaching internship in 2003-04.
Taylor, who taught six undergraduate courses during her six-month stay, said the shortage of qualified agriculture teachers is an ongoing concern in Ethiopia.
Grad students and lecturers from Canada, the United States and Europe can help fill the need for qualified teachers but they need to be sensitive to the cultural and economic factors that exist in Ethiopia, she said.
For example, zero-till farming, which has helped reduce soil erosion on the Canadian Prairies, may not be practical in Ethiopia because the straw from crops is harvested along with the grain and is used as heating fuel and animal feed.
“Agriculture over there is a lot different than it is here,” Taylor said.
“It’s pretty much all subsistence farming over there so once you’ve lived there, you can see how some of our ideas and practices would not be very well-suited for farmers in Ethiopia. Sometimes, the things that we see as easy to fix are not really so simple at all.”
Taylor said she considers her teaching experience in Ethiopia to be the highlight of her academic career and is now considering a full-time career in education, international development work or disaster relief.
“Before I went, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do professionally but now I definitely have a strong interest in doing development work,” she said. “I just feel very fortunate that I was given the opportunity to go over there.”
