Tamale Senior High School (SHS) has emerged winners of the 2023 ‘School Farm’ contest which is meant to arouse the interests of students on innovations in agribusiness and agricultural technologies.
Bepong SHS in the Eastern Region followed up on the second position while Mankesim Senior High Technical School placed third.
For the Junior High School (JHS) category, Adoe D/A and Wenchi SVD JHS took the first and second positions, respectively.
The School Farm Competition, an initiative of the Blue Skies Foundation in partnership with Kosmos Innovation Center (KIC) is an agricultural school challenge project that aims to increase the desire of young people through learning experience, by providing the schools with inputs (seeds and basic farm tools) to cultivate their crops on designated school farms.
This will encourage them to consider agriculture as an income generating venture in their life journey, while improving Ghana’s food security.
Dr. William Kwame Amankra Appiah, Ashanti Regional Director of Education, at the event stated that, the annual school farms competition served as a testament of commitment of educational institutions to go beyond traditional boundaries.
He believed that through the initiative, schools had witnessed the transformative power of merging Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education with practical, hands-on experiences in sustainable agriculture.
According to him, schools had become laboratories of creativity where students not only grasp scientific concepts but also apply them to address real-world challenges.
Dr Appiah mentioned that the collaboration with the Blue Skies Foundation and partners had cultivated a platform that went beyond textbooks, encouraging students to engage with the environment and understand the interconnectedness of STEM in the realm of agriculture.
He commended the participating schools, educators, and students for their unwavering dedication to excellence, saying they have not only yielded impressive harvests but have also sown the seeds of a future where innovation and sustainability walk hand in hand.
Mr. Benjamin Gyan-Kesse, Executive Director of KIC explaining the idea of the awards said it could bring back the love of agriculture and farming in the youth.
He said over the years agriculture had been treated as punishment to the youth, and for that matter, most youth came out of school not really like agriculture, “meanwhile agriculture is a real business when you venture into it and put the best practices.”
Mr. Gyan-Kesse mentioned that the programme was going to be expanded, adding that, currently about 210 schools in eleven Regions in Ghana were participating in it.
By Florence Afriyie Mensah, GNA
Congratulations to all Blue Skies, KIC, participating schools