Supervised Enterprise Projects (SEP) is geared at equipping students with elementary skills necessary for carrying out participatory action research to improve various nodes of the agricultural value chain as they carry out their roles in the field.
SEP involves a number of activities including the provision of knowledge on principles and concepts underlying SEP; provision of skills on applying principles action research and writing SEP projects; provision of skills on carrying out situation analysis to identify a researchable problem; provision of techniques for writing proposals, conducting data collection and doing analysis of data; provision of skills on writing SEP proposals; and finally applying all of the mentioned skills in a real-life situation for 8 weeks in the second and third year of study.
Specifically, students are attached to a social enterprise to gain hands-on field experience. Students are assigned a SEP supervisor from the Department of Agricultural Education and Extension. In addition to that, a student is assigned a supervisor at a host institution who is going to oversee students’ day-to-day activities. At the end of the first and second 8-weeks sessions of field attachment, students are required to submit a SEP report to be scored by a SEP supervisor at the Department of Agricultural Education and Extension. The students are required to make use of the action research component of the SEP to come up with a solution to a problem that communities face. The majority of students have managed to do so. One of the successful SEP interventions was by Mr. Josephat Dauson Malela. In 2020, Mr. Malela created a fridge using locally available materials to help peasants store vegetables. The shelf life of vegetables such as local spinach and cabbage increases by seven days. Another student whose name is Flavian Sambala helped a farmer build a chicken house. The farmer lived in Msolwa Ujamaa at Kilombero district.
Photos from Malela SEP interventions
Photos on SEP Intervention by Sambala
