Abstract:
Ethiopia is an agrarian country and agriculture is the backbone of its economy. Consequently, the government of Ethiopia has devised Agricul- tural Development Led Industrialization (ADLI) as the country’s overall economic development policy. For the last 15 years, public investment towards the expansion of higher education, re-search and extension in agriculture has been so enormous. In reality, however, these higher edu- cation and research institutions were not suffi-ciently responsive to rural transformation. Thus, to evaluate the role of higher education and re-search institutions in stimulating rural transfor- mation and to identify main training constraints accountable for their poor performances in in-stitutional learning and rural transformation is of paramount importance. To this effect focus group discussions and key informant inter-views were conducted. Stratified and purposive sampling technique was dominantly employed during the survey studies. The result of the study has shown that higher education and re-search institutions were less responsive to ad-dress the actual problems of small-scale farmers and they were limited by a number of constraints/ challenges to address the actual problems of farmers. The major constraints were, to list some, limited involvement in research and ex-tension works by the university staff, students limited practical attachments of the training pro- grammes with farming communities, limited in-frastructures and facilities and limited availability of contextualized learning resources. In address- ing the aforesaid constraints/challenges, the uni versity staff should proportionally allocate time in the research and extension activities on top of practical teaching supported by local research results and experience; involving students on practical attachments both in their academic and vacation time; giving emphasis on basic training preparation like fulfilling libraries, la- boratories, demonstration fields and transpor-tation facilities; and lastly to revise the existing curriculum in to the direction of solving the real problems of the Amhara region then the country Ethiopia
