The Year Five sessions of the Liberia Media for Democratic Initiatives National Academic Challenge Competitions (LMDI-NACC) Liberia’s only set of sustained annual national general knowledge Quizzing competitions have begun with focus on agriculture as a key theme with the aim to instill agriculture in high school pupils of Liberia.
The Year Five sessions began recently with a set of exhibition matches among three schools in Montserrado County, Monrovia based high schools namely, the Catholic Cathedral, the Baptist Calver Mission and the privately owned African Dream Academy.
In partnership with Liberia’s Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), with funding from the World Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) the LMDI will roll out national pop quizzing games throughout 2023 while at the same time supporting a set of national inter-college agriculture debate competitions. All the categories of competitions with STAR-P/RETRAP specific focused will be organized by the Liberia Media for Democratic Initiatives (LMDI).
The inter-college debates are being conducted among students of departments and colleges of agriculture and business across Liberia. The debates are bringing together professors of agriculture and business, policymakers, and other stakeholders as informers of debate propositions and the students as debaters and audiences on the other.
The debates are focused on the Smallholder Agriculture Transformation and Agribusiness Revitalization Project (STAR-P) and the Rural Economic Transformation Project (RETRAP) as interventions that are key to the general revitalization of Liberia’s general agricultural outlook and by extension the economic revitalization and development of Liberia. The debates are being rolled out on LMDI dialogue-style debate platform, DUCOR DEBATES.
At the same time, LMDI has started rolling out sessions of the STAR-P/RETRAP specific pop quiz categories as part of its annual national academic challenge competitions for Liberian high schools. LMDI experience in conducting this national general knowledge competition amongst senior secondary school students has shown that the students do not even know about major policy life style and existential requirements like agriculture and related projects, and decisions such as STAR-Project and RETRAP.
LMDI is researching and preparing questions of specific and general knowledge about STAR-P and RETRAP so that answers provided will help to educate young people and the public about key STAR-P & RETRAP jargons and processes so that the concepts of the projects are understood as major leeways to national agricultural and economic recovery.
This set of national academic competitions, named and styled TOMORROW’S PEOPLE, gets the widest coverage across the nation as the games, like the debates, are broadcast on our partner radios.
It is expected that the Ministry of Agriculture, with support from the World Bank and IFAD, will provide various prizes for winners as the competitions progress throughout the year around the country.
