AN OPENING ceremony for the ‘Introduction to School Garden Concept for Schools in Brunei Darussalam’ and ‘Capacity Building on Food Processing, Packaging, and Marketing for Staff and Students of IBTE Agro Technology Campus’ was held at the Institute of Brunei Technical Education (IBTE) School of Agro-Technology and Applied Sciences yesterday.
Ambassador of Indonesia to Brunei Darussalam Dr Sujatmiko was the guest of honour.

Acting Director and Chief Executive Officer of IBTE Dr Haji Zamri bin Haji Sabli, Director of SEAMEO BIOTROP Dr Irdika Mansur and Principal of IBTE Satellite Campus Norjeeme bin Jenek were also present.

The introduction of the two training programmes was established following the signing of an MoU between IBTE and SEAMEO BIOTROP’s on Advancing Agro-technology Education and Application in Southeast Asia on May 22. One of the scope and fields of cooperation is to conduct a collaborative research and training.

SEAMEO BIOTROP has developed simple technologies that are suitable for community development as well as empowerment of vocational schools.

The ‘Introduction to School Garden Concept for Schools in Brunei Darussalam’ programme will be participated by 13 instructors and from 13 schools.

The school garden programme of SEAMEO BIOTROP aims to improve nutrition, literacy, and entrepreneurship among students. SEAMEO BIOTROP will partner with School of Agro-Technology and Applied Sciences to introduce the programme to schools in Brunei.
School garden is also a powerful object to learn language, mathematics and science.

The ‘Capacity Building on Food Processing, Packaging, and Marketing for Staff and Students of IBTE Agro-Technology Campus’ will be participated by 11 staff and nine students of IBTE School of Agro-Technology and Applied Sciences, as well as three officers from IBTE Continuing Education and Training (IBTE CET).

The programme will introduce and promote entrepreneurship to students of IBTE School of Agro-Technology and Applied Sciences through the production of healthy drinks and food, and to maximise the use of food processing facilities to produce various drinks and food on a commercial scale.

Students will learn entrepreneurship from the harvesting, packaging, and sale of the fruits and vegetables they produce at the school garden, offline and online.