Tracking University Development Contributions: Emerging Indicators from Moi University

Agricultural universities have a tripartite mandate to design and deliver effective and development relevant academic, research and outreach programmes. Conventional university training, tracking, grading and reporting emphasizes the academic and research components, and hardly reports against outreach. Consequently, outreach remains poorly funded, and if there are any contributions of universities to development innovations, these have gone unnoticed or credit given to partners who adopt and scale out the innovations. Through the Outreach (CARPs) programme the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) is piloting experiential learning and value chain approaches, aimed at improving university effectiveness to address development challenges. The question being raised is; with the weak tracking and reporting against outreach results, will the three pilot universities be able to capture and articulate the lessons and impacts from this programme, to appropriately inform the scaling out to the rest of RUFORUM universities? The paper uses the provisional results from Moi Chepkolel University CARP project to generate discussions around three main questions: The importance of outreach as part of students training, the reporting and value attached to its results, and the way forward. Preliminary results from Moi show that students have more than met the initial Outreach target of reaching 300 farmers, by engaging over 900 farmers through their outreach activities, have produced a Communication tool, drafted field handbook of pests and diseases, drafted a community level register of striga affected farms and are embarking on processing and branding 9 soya/peanut products with Farmers Associations, all of which are outside of their academic requirements for graduation.