Ethiopian Horticulture Producer Exporters Association (EHPEA) established it’s Code of Practice (CoP), which has been considered as a major accomplishment within Ethiopia’s horticulture sector, in 2007 and it has been offering about 21 different types of training courses to support farms in compliance with the CoP and other international standards.
The excellence of providing these standard training services, makes EHPEA to be the only institution in Ethiopia. It is true that EHPEA’s members’ compliance with international standards and the CoP promote their good management practices and also facilitates market access, particularly in the export markets.
With the objective to ensure the financial sustainability of EHPEA’s standard CoP Training services and mainly to respond to the requirements of a changing environment by transferring the knowledge and skills to the trainees, EHPEA has been taking steps to upgrade and re-establish its CoP training services into a Semi-Autonomous Training Centre.
Accordingly, the EHPEA’s Semi-Autonomous Training centre become accredited by the Addis Ababa TVET Office (Technical Vocational and Education and Training Office) by fulfilling the long list of mandatory processes that required attaining and submitting a number of legal documents, such as Teaching Learning materials, Student hand book, Legislation , Strategy and Certificate of Competence for trainers.
The Training Centre will have an independent management structure that include and Executive Board, a Director, a Dean, Vice Dean, Department Heads, which will be consider as the Management of the new centre.
The centre with the support of EHPEA, will work on redefining the training centre’s programmes / topics, improving the contents and quality of its services, designing methods to best suit to the individual needs of the trainees, and putting these new methods and ways into functions.
Furthermore, the Training Centre guarantee availability of high excellence training to the horticulture sector. This includes national and international actors all across the value chain levels, from junior employees to top-level managers to enable further development of the horticulture sector, enhance the knowledge in the country, reaching a competitive position in the international market.
