Nesmy Manigat, the Minister of National Education and Vocational Training inaugurated Monday, May 1st, 2023 the first agricultural technical school in Haiti in the town of Petit-Trou-de-Nippes.

"Today we are inaugurating the first agricultural technical school in Haiti. It is an institution that will train professionals to work in various fields such as agriculture, fishing, horticulture. This training will also prepare them for the management of agricultural enterprises, the management and maintenance of technical agricultural equipment," said Minister Manigat who explained that the general education network will still exist in this high school, but with the component of the teaching agricultural techniques.

The agricultural technical school of Petit-Trou-de-Nippes is built on an area of approximately 1.30 hectares, Manigat indicated that the appropriate arrangements have already been made, in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture, to establish on site an agro-school farm where students will experiment while continuing to produce food to put on their plate or sell on the market.

"This inauguration carries the dream of Louis-Joseph Janvier coupled with the dream of Jacques Roumain Joseph C. Bernard. It is a dream of an education that offers everyone equal opportunities to succeed through a school based on the promotion of the natural and cultural wealth of the country. It is a school where Haitians learn to better know the gifts of nature to the country, but also to work to give them more value in protecting them; work so that we can get from them a lot of what their families need to survive [...] And that's the possibility of the land, that's the potential of the water, that's the possibility of the sea," continued the Minister while recalling the need for the country to start looking more closely at all the possibilities that a green economy (farming on land) and a blue economy (exploitation of the sea) offer.

This agricultural technical school has 18 classrooms, an administrative block, two toilet blocks, a teachers' meeting room, a media library, an infirmary, a kitchen area, a refectory room, a cistern and a field for various sports games.

This high school was built to the tune of 82 million gourdes. The Arab Fund for Cooperation for Economic Development provided 77% of the funds. The remaining 33% was provided by the National Education Fund (FNE).

After the ceremony, Minister Nesmy Manigat went to the school grounds to assess the remaining work for the deployment of the agro-school farm. The minister with some students, took advantage of the moment and planted some fruit trees like mango trees.

HL/ HaitiLibre