Twenty-eight primary, secondary and vocational school teachers completed BIOTROP’s Third Training Course on Establishing School Garden for Improving Students’ Literacy, Nutrition, and Entrepreneurship on 23-27 July 2018 held at the Centre’s headquarter in Bogor.

Twelve of these schools were from Bogor City that would pioneer the efforts of turning the City into a School Garden City as part of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Centre and the City Government of Bogor.

BIOTROP Director Dr Irdika Mansur, during his opening remarks, emphasized the potential of school garden in addressing malnutrition and poor academic performance of students as well as in providing source of income to schools as well as to the families of the students. He considered the training course as the Centre’s contribution to SEAMEO’s goal of building the future of human resources of Southeast Asia as its legacy. He also encouraged the participants to come up with feasible school garden action plans for implementation in their respective schools.

For this year’s offering of the course, two new sessions were added. These sessions were “Integration of School Garden in Classroom Learning” delivered by Ms. Yayah Komariah from Bogor City Education Office, and “Formulation of Action Research Project Proposal on School Garden” lectured by BIOTROP Deputy Director for Program Dr Jess C. Fernandez.

The participants turned over drafts of their individual action research project proposals as the major requirement of the training course.

Two participants were recognized as Most Active Male and Female Participants. They were Mr. Rodi Ibrahim from SMPN 1 Palmatak and Ms. Fera Maulidya Sukarno from SMPN 1 Subang, respectively. Ms. Mimin Arminah from RA Fajr Insani was recognized as the Most Improved Participants for having the highest gain on her post-test result.