Great progress has been made over the last few years in the agricultural sector in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean region as a whole. However, the progress made has left a gap between university-level agricultural training and the labour market needs in the sector. “Strengthening the Network: ‘Professionalising Agricultural Training’ in Haiti and Dominican Republic” project aims to tackle this problem and to improve the adequacy between training in agricultural universities and employment on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean by providing solutions tailored to the requirements of the agricultural sector.

The project brings together the Faculty of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine of the University of Haiti and the Agricultural Institute of Higher Education in the Dominican Republic. This cooperation will be supported by an exchange of experiences and training with “Montpellier SupAgro”, the international centre for studies in agronomic sciences in France. The partnership aims to improve the academic and institutional capacities of Haitian and Dominican universities to train future professionals working in the fields of rural development, agriculture and agro-food industry. The goal is to equip them with the skills needed to meet the new economic challenges and expectations in the agricultural and agro-food sectors in these two countries.

On the basis of this analysis, the second stage of the project will consist of creating semantic training modules. These modules will pave the way to practical transversal skills with strong emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship, which are today required of agronomic engineers. The training needs for lecturers will also be assessed and the mobility of teachers and students of the partner institutions will be facilitated.

The third stage of the project will focus on training lecturers. These trainings will be provided in the form of short or long-term practical internships in the Dominican Republic, Haiti or France. They will also take the form of support missions in the training of lecturers from other universities, in particular French ones.