By Nesia Mhaka
Agricultural colleges have been advised to focus attention on leveraging private investment in agriculture including through fostering public-private investment collaboration, as a means to access critical resources and achieve sustainability and scale-up business production.
Agriculture in the current competitive environment needs more focus to improve the quality and quantity of produce.
Global climate change and water scarcity have emerged as the major challenges to agricultural sustainability, which need to be addressed through multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional efforts with use of cutting edge technologies and forging partnerships across institutions and sectors.
In Zimbabwe, Government and private institutions are working for the development of agriculture and up-liftmen of the farmers’ community.
Production, processing and marketing in agriculture are dynamic in nature due to continuous changes in consumers’ demand and expectations. An innovative approach is essential to meet the current challenges facing agriculture.
Public Private Partnership (PPP), is one of the best strategies to achieve the specified goals within a timeframe and modernise public services and infrastructure in agriculture, health, science and technology, education, infrastructure development and extension.
Through the PPP approach, impossibilities will be made possible with the contribution of both public and private partners resulting in better economic conditions and livelihood of target populations.
“Agriculture training centres should therefore embrace public-private partnerships to unlock value in their training activities.”
This was said by Mr Francis Vengai who is the deputy director in the department of Agricultural Education and Farmers Training at the Climate Smart Agriculture Training of the Trainer workshop Program at Mazowe Veterinary and Shamva Agriculture Training Colleges last week.
Mr Vengai said that through such partnerships, revitalisation of agriculture and the agro-processing value chain, beneficiation and value addition, infrastructure development and other objectives can be realised.
“Private sector investment can be facilitated by the following measures; focusing on areas where returns are sufficient to attract interest from the private sector, blending and leveraging public funding to secure private funding and exploring other innovative solutions.
“PPPs bring in private sector management skills and are more efficient in that one entity is charged with the design, construction, operation and financing.
“Private sector partners have often been more realistic in their estimates of time and costs than public agencies,” he added.
Speaking at the same event, climate change scientists in the Ministry of Environment, Climate, Tourism and Hospitality Industry said there are more incentives for the private sector and private partners to build a realistic financial model that takes into account all the costs and revenue flows in agriculture training institutions.
“The main advantage that PPPs have, comes from the lowering of the total cost and improved project risk management.
“PPPs are able to provide a more flexible and timely use of finance for vital infrastructure investments that might otherwise be tied up and inhibited by public debt pressures,” they said.
Mazowe Veterinary College principal, Dr Donora Nyamadzawo said they want to partner with the public and private sectors but they do not have enough land to develop and expand their projects.
“We really want to involve PPPs here but unlike other Agriculture Colleges, this college does not have enough land to develop any project, you can look at our animals here, they are very few because we have limited space to accommodate them.
“We are appealing for the government to do something about it,” he said.
