Across Uganda, one question continues to shape the future of vocational education: how can skills training translate directly into jobs, enterprises, and sustainable livelihoods for young people? At Rwentanga Farm Institute in Mbarara City, that national challenge has found a practical, human-centred response-driven by empowered trainers, modern equipment, and a bold rethinking of how Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) should work.
At the center of this transformation stands Ms. Annet Kyarisiima, a dedicated TVET tutor whose journey mirrors the very change BEAR II set out to inspire. For her, agriculture-based training was never meant to end at production alone. It had to speak to markets, income, and dignity.
“When students arrive here, they come with production knowledge,” she explains. “What they don’t come with are business skills, how to add value, how to brand, how to market, how to earn.”
For years, Ms. Annet taught with passion but within clear limitations. Like many instructors across Uganda’s TVET system, she worked in an environment where theory outweighed practice. Students learned about Agro-processing, value addition, and agribusiness in principle, but rarely touched modern equipment or applied these concepts in real production settings.
“We were teaching students about machines they had never seen,” she recalls. “They understood the ideas, but they couldn’t yet apply them.”
This disconnect between training and labour market realities is a long-standing challenge within Uganda’s skills ecosystem. It is precisely the gap the Better Education for Africa’s Rise Phase II (BEAR II) Project – implemented by UNESCO in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) and funded by the Government of the Republic of Korea – was designed to address.
In Uganda, BEAR II prioritized Agro-processing and post-harvest management, recognizing the sector’s critical role in job creation, food security, and agro-industrialisation, as outlined in Uganda Vision 2040, the National Development Plan III (NDP III), and the Skilling Uganda Strategic Plan.
For Ms. Annet, the turning point came when she was selected to participate in a one-week intensive capacity-building programme at the Uganda Research Institute (URI), supported under BEAR II. The training exposed her to modern, market-responsive value-addition techniques, many which had never been practiced at Rwentanga before.
She learned tomato processing, hygienic food handling, confectionery production, cake baking, and even winemaking using locally available raw materials such as bananas, mushrooms, and pineapples.
“That training changed my mindset,” she says. “I realized that value is everywhere. Even things we ignored – like mushrooms – could be transformed into viable products.”
The experience aligned directly with one of BEAR II’s core objectives: enhancing the quality of TVET by strengthening trainer competencies to deliver relevant, labour-market-aligned skills that support Agro-processing value chains and inclusive economic growth.
The impact was immediate and deeply personal. At the time, Ms Annet was Head of Department for Animal Production. But the training opened her eyes to new possibilities.
“The very day I returned, I asked the Principal to move me to Agro-processing department where my new skills would be set for use,” she recalls. “We had a small building and limited space, but I knew what was possible.”
Soon after, Rwentanga Farm Institute received BEAR II-supported Agro-processing equipment, including modern food-processing tools, a milling machine, and digital weighing scales. Ms Annet wasted no time integrating the equipment into teaching, transforming classrooms into living laboratories.
read more: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/how-annet-turning-agro-processing-skills-opportunity-rwentanga-farm-institute?hub=701
