Baku, September 22, AZERTAC

BP on behalf of its co-venturers in the projects that it operates - the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG), Shah Deniz, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil export pipeline and the South Caucasus Pipeline projects, has announced a new partnership with the Ministry of Education in support of enhancement of the agricultural vocational training in Azerbaijan. The project is expected to result in the development of a range of new agricultural occupations and trades thus contributing to the country’s plans to raise the efficiency of the agricultural sector.

Under this partnership, BP and its co-venturers are committing to upgrading agricultural vocational education framework in Azerbaijan. This will include development of up-to-date teaching materials, textbooks and training methodology for a number of new agricultural occupations and trades in the country.

As a pilot phase, the project scope also includes the training of some 20 local trainers who will use the new teaching methodology and skills, specializing in the newly-created occupations and trades. If successful the pilot phase experience will be applied to scale up the project to cover all agricultural vocational schools across the country.

Addressing the partnership launch event held in Baku today, Gordon Birrell, BP’s Regional President for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, said: “BP and its co-venturers are pleased to join this educational project for communities. We believe it supports the overall efforts to increase the employment opportunities for vocational school graduates and helps meet the demands of the local labour market in skilled people specializing in agricultural disciplines. This is a substantial project consisting of 12 training modules which will use the newly-created evaluation frameworks, curriculum, textbooks and other teaching materials. All this will be validated by the Institute for Educational Affairs of the Ministry of Education to align them with the country’s agricultural development objectives. We expect high quality results from this pilot project and believe that it will boost the creation of a new methodology, new disciplines and trends in the agricultural vocational training across the country”.

The value of the project is over 358,000 AZN with the duration of one year – September 2016 - September 2017. It will be implemented by the British Council. The newly-developed occupations and disciplines will cover such areas as horticulture (plants and their usage; sowing and maintenance/farming; soil and substrates – 3 modules); crop production (grain growing; growing of fruit; maize cultivation; root crops growing; cotton growing – 5 modules); and agricultural machinery/agro-service (machine maintenance; machine repair; use of agricultural machine; work completion with agricultural machine – 4 modules).