The international certificate course “Entrepreneurship and Innovations in Food and Agriculture” started with a special kick-off event on September 17, 2024 in Kitui, Kenya. 20 students from South Eastern Kenya University (SEKU) are attending the certificate course, which is offered jointly by SEKU and HSWT as part of the DAAD project “Applied Sciences for Life – Internationalizing Best Practices”. In addition to the students, four team leaders from Welthungerhilfe and its partner organizations part in the design thinking workshop and contributed interesting questions from their practice.
The Welthungerhilfe tasks offered a real context in which the participants could directly apply their newly acquired skills to develop creative solutions. They were accompanied by design thinking expert Tobias Greissing and his co-moderators Marlies Resch from the Food Startup Incubator Weihenstephan (FSIWS) and Hanno Koßmann. The students, most of whom had no previous contact with design thinking, were enthusiastic about the method. The collaboration between students and team leaders with different cultural backgrounds created an atmosphere of mutual understanding and respect in which innovative ideas for the areas of food and agriculture were developed together, which resulted in concrete start-up ideas.
The certificate course will continue online from October to January and has been opened to students from other HSWT partner universities. This semester, 70 students from SEKU and JOOUST in Kenya and the KKU in Thailand as well as some Welthungerhilfe employees are taking part in the course. Here, participants can acquire practical and theoretical content on innovations in the food and agricultural sector, supported by a team of lecturers from SEKU and HSWT. In the new year, an introduction to starting a business will complete the certificate course. This is intended to encourage participants to put their ideas into practice in their own company.
