Objective

Objective

Long-term Objectives

The Project supports the Country Partnership Strategy and addresses the three engagement areas of integration, transformation and inclusion. These engagement areas foresee increased agricultural productivity and support quality improvements of higher education to create a more skilled workforce that continuously improves the productivity of key sectors, including agriculture. The proposed Project is also a multi-Global Practice collaboration (Agriculture and Education) and is expected to support activities and results directly related to cross-cutting strategic areas of climate change, jobs and gender.

The proposed NAHEP would contribute to the achievement of four Sustainable Development Goals, namely:

• Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education zonal training; and (b) greater gender and wealth equity through universal access to quality higher education. Specifically, NAHEP would finance interventions that increase the stand promote lifelong learning opportunities for all – promotes: (a) equal access to affordable vocatpply of qualified technicians and teachers
• Promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment, and decent work for all – seeks higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological up gradation and innovation.NAHEP would foster a stronger innovation culture by twinning participating AUs with other higher-performing centers of learning (both in India and internationally) and strengthening AU-private sector linkages to better orient student learning toward market-relevant skill sets.
• Building resilient infrastructure, promoting sustainable industrialization, and fostering innovation – would enhance scientific research, and substantially increase both the research and development (R&D) workforce and its associated budget.
• Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts – would improve education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning. The proposed NAHEP would specifically target AU curricula reform to internalize climate change and resilience in current and future course content and tie this with experiential learning for certificate, undergraduate and post-graduate students for practical career applications.

Project Development objectives

The objective of the Project is to support Participating Agricultural Universities and ICAR in providing more relevant and higher quality education to Agricultural University students.NAHEP addresses quality by supporting interested AUs to propose and implement technically sound and verifiable investments that increase faculty performance, attract better students to these AUs, improve student learning outcomes and raise their prospects for future employability, particularly in the private sector.

I. Project Beneficiaries

NAHEP would target institutions that form the ICAR-AU System, consisting of State Agricultural Universities, Deemed Universities, Central Universities with Agricultural Faculty and Central Agricultural Universities.

Students would benefit from:

(a) a movement from teaching to learning-centered education, leveraging ICT and external partnerships
(b) Piloting effective stakeholder participation in curricula development, pedagogy options and course evaluation
(c) Increased equity in educational access through vocational and technical certificate programs
(d) An overall improvement in the learning and academic environment that would both expand and sharpen their skill set needed for future employment.

Faculty would benefit from:

(a) Increased collaboration among Indian AUs and with other universities globally to raise research quality and its linkage to educational quality and relevance
(b) Training and capacity-building to improve the delivery of education and its learning outcomes.

Institute would benefit:

(a)Governance &transparency
(b) Infrastructural development
(c) Productive campus culture and Intensive use of technology enabled learning

 II. Results Indicators

• Increased AU on-time graduation rates, disaggregated by gender and SC/ST;
• Increased cut-off scores for students in ICAR Entrance Tests, disaggregated by gender and SC/ST;
• Increased student placement rates, disaggregated by gender and SC/ST;
• Increased faculty research effectiveness; and
• Number of project beneficiaries, disaggregated by students/ faculty, gender and SC/ST.
• Increased visibility & technology use.