A visit to the Songhaï Centre in Porto-Novo, held on September 5, 2024, marked the end of a series of educational visits initiated by the ProRUWA (Promoting Academic Capacities for Sustainable Agricultural Resources use in West Africa) project in collaboration with the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences (FSA) with the aim of rewarding the efforts of 25 of the faculty’s best students during the 2023-2024 academic year. This visit began with a brief presentation of the history, objectives and activities of the centre by the guide.
Occupying 22 hectares in Porto-Novo and maintaining other locations both within Benin and internationally, Songhaï aims to ‘produce better, more, with less’ through the integration of economic activities across the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors with a focus on agroecology.
The students visited various units in the primary sector, including market gardening, experimental crop production, livestock farming (poultry, sheep, fish farming, etc.) and forage production.
They then discovered secondary sector processing units, including rice parboiling and hulling, palm oil and soybean processing, feed milling and composting.
In addition, the students were introduced to innovative facilities such as biogas production system that recycles the centre’s bio-waste and the agri-photovoltaic system, which combines agricultural activities with the production of solar energy. Finally, the tour ended with a visit to the shopping centre, where the centre’s products (eggs, soaps, juices, etc.) are on display.
This educational visit gave the students a better understanding of the centre’s activities and its contributions to the agricultural and ecological fields, while at the same time stimulating in them a real motivation for agricultural entrepreneurship.
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