The Blue Skies Foundation has launched a new toolkit to help businesses and organisations start their own School Farm of the Year Competition.
The Toolkit will be unveiled during the 5th annual awards of the Blue Skies School Farm Competition in Ghana where the 2020 School Farm winners will be announced during a ‘live streamed’ ceremony on the 30th of October.
The Blue Skies School Farm Competition was started in 2015 to encourage more young people to consider farming as a career by enabling schools to compete against each other to grow and manage their own school farms. The competition is sponsored by Blue Skies, Waitrose & Partners and Albert Heijn, and supported by the Ghana Education Service, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Food and Agriculture.
Prizes are awarded to schools that produce the best farm in terms of how they engage with students in farming to promote active learning, and develop a positive attitude about food and agriculture, the environment and entrepreneurialism.
Since the competition was started, it has:
- Engaged over 3,000 students in the competition
- Encouraged students to go on to study agriculture
- Enabled schools to generate a supplementary income through the sale of crops
- Awarded 56 winning schools with computers and IT equipment
Victoria Asamoah who runs the Blue Skies School Farm Competition said “This competition has had a big impact on how our young people perceive agriculture. They now have a new respect for our farmers and can see just how rewarding and lucrative it can be if it is done well. We need a new crop of farmers to keep our county fed. The Blue Skies School Farm competition is helping to find them”
This toolkit has been produced to enable other companies to copy the Blue Skies model and introduce their own competition that will raise the profile of agriculture within their area and help find the farmers of the future.
The toolkit can be downloaded from: fresh.blueskies.com/schoolfarm
You will be able to view the livestream of the awards ceremony via our friends at Beanstalk.Global and on our School Farm Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/blueskiesschoolfarm/
