UBTSInternational Corp.
UBTS Academy · Conceptual Framework & Deployment Blueprint
UBTS Academy is the talent engine of the UBTS Group: a Group-level flagship programme, run in parallel with the UBTS Agritech Programme and its Africa Agritech Digital Passport (UAP ↔ UAA-DP), that trains, places and hires the professionals African agricultural science needs.
01Executive summary
UAA-DP is built on a scientific protocol that measures the quality of any agricultural product from the soil to the buyer. That protocol runs on people: agronomists who attest crop health, technicians who take soil and laboratory samples, inspectors who audit producer groups, data stewards who keep every record accountable. UBTS Academy exists to produce those people at the scale and quality a continental programme requires.
The Academy does not build campuses. It partners with vocational training centres and state-owned and private universities, brings them a curriculum built around the UAA-DP protocol, and earns a share of their tuition fees. Its students receive internships along the UAA-DP chain and a pathway to be hired by UBTS or to join the Contributing Experts Community as independent professionals.
02Why an Academy
01
The UAA-DP protocol holds 238 scientific and custody parameters across 12 crops and 8 supply-chain actors. For any one crop, between 146 and 161 parameters apply. Many depend on a qualified human being: a growth-stage assessment, a disease-incidence score, a yield forecast, a field sample, an internal inspection.
02
UAA-DP delivers its field science through the Contributing Experts Community — independent agronomists and technicians paid per accepted deliverable. A distributed community only stays credible when its members share a method. The Academy is where that method is taught, practised and certified.
03
Côte d’Ivoire had 323,467 students in higher education in 2023-24, around 70% of them in private institutions. The State aims to raise the share of secondary-level learners in technical and vocational education from 5% to 15% by 2030, with a target of 70% workforce insertion. Employers contribute 1.6% of gross payroll to the vocational training fund (FDFP).
03The Academy in one sentence
UBTS Academy turns students into the agronomists, technicians and inspectors that put science behind every premium lot — and gives them a career doing it.
04Genesis
The Group earned a first-class telecommunications licence in Cameroon in 2021 after a sustained negotiation with the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and the regulator ART, and then introduced the Africa Agritech Digital Passport into Cameroonian agriculture with the Ministry of Agriculture and PROFALCAM. Each step required people the market did not yet train.
On 26 September 2026, as UAA-DP was repositioned as a continental programme launching from Côte d’Ivoire, UBTS Academy was established as a Group-level flagship programme, run in parallel with UAP ↔ UAA-DP. It partners with vocational training centres and universities, shares in their tuition revenue, offers its students internships, and opens a hiring pathway into UBTS.
05Vision, mission and core thesis
Vision
whose measurements the world’s premium buyers trust.
Mission
the professionals who run the UAA-DP protocol, with partner institutions across the continent.
Core thesis
keep them independent, and give them a career — and the whole value chain becomes more valuable.
06The Academy model
| Partner institutions bring | UBTS Academy brings | |
|---|---|---|
| Teaching | Faculty, classrooms, laboratories, accreditation and diplomas | A curriculum built on the UAA-DP protocol and its reference science |
| Practice | Student supervision and assessment | Internships along the UAA-DP chain, with real plots, lots and laboratories |
| Careers | Graduates with recognised qualifications | A hiring pathway into UBTS and the Contributing Experts Community |
| Economics | Tuition-paying enrolment | A differentiated, employment-linked programme that attracts students |
07Who the Academy partners with
Partner type 1
Technician-level programmes: field sampling, post-harvest handling, laboratory assistance, data capture.
Partner type 2
Degree programmes in agronomy, soil science, plant pathology, food science and data.
Partner type 3
Degree and professional programmes, including agribusiness, trade and supply-chain management.
Partner type 4
Cooperatives, processors, exporters and laboratories that host internships.
08Curriculum architecture
The curriculum follows the UAA-DP protocol section by section. Partner institutions embed Academy modules in their existing diplomas or offer them as stand-alone certificates.
| # | Track | Focus | Leads to |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Soil and field science | Soil pH, moisture, N/P/K, organic matter, salinity; plot mapping and polygon geolocation | Field technician |
| 2 | Agronomy and crop-health attestation | Growth stages, crop-health scoring, disease incidence, yield forecasting | Attesting agronomist |
| 3 | Harvest and post-harvest quality | Dry matter, moisture, fermentation, bean count, grading, storage | Quality controller |
| 4 | Laboratory analytics and food safety | Mycotoxins, cyanide, cup score, fat content, fibre quality; reference limits | Laboratory technician |
| 5 | Custody, logistics and compliance | Per-leg custody, cold chain, phytosanitary and origin certificates, due-diligence references | Compliance officer |
| 6 | Data stewardship and digital passport operations | Data capture, source and timestamp discipline, personal-data protection, API links to national systems | Passport data steward |
| 7 | Carbon and environmental data | Land-sector emissions data, forest baselines, water and biodiversity context | Environmental data analyst |
| 8 | Premium trade and markets | How premium buyers price quality; ethical trade structures | Trade associate |
| 9 | Professional ethics and independence | The inspection firewall, conflicts of interest, deliverable standards | All tracks (mandatory) |
09Formats
Partner institutions deliver Academy learning in four formats.
10The talent pathway
The student joins an Academy-partnered programme.
Protocol-aligned modules in class and laboratory.
Automatic internship along the UAA-DP chain.
UBTS Protocol Practitioner certification.
Join the Contributing Experts Community or be hired by UBTS.
11Internships and careers
Automatic internships
Every student in an Academy-partnered programme is offered an internship within the UAA-DP network — cooperatives, industrial growers, processors, exporters, accredited laboratories and UBTS itself. Internships follow the law of each country. In Côte d’Ivoire, qualification internships are governed by Decree 2018-33 of 17 January 2018 (written agreement, allowance, registration and a maximum duration of twelve months, with a limit on the number of interns a host may take relative to its permanent workforce); school internships follow their own regime. Distributing placements across many hosts is what makes the internship promise scalable.
Hiring and the Contributing Experts Community
Certified graduates may be hired by UBTS or its country affiliates, or join the Contributing Experts Community as independent professionals with their own schedules, tools and clients, paid per accepted deliverable. The Academy prepares them for both paths — and for the independence the second path requires.
12Partnership and revenue model
| Source | How it works |
|---|---|
| Tuition revenue share | The Academy earns a share of the tuition fees collected on Academy-partnered programmes, per academic term, on terms set in each partnership agreement and consistent with the rules that apply to the partner institution. |
| Employer co-funding | Value-chain partners that host interns and hire graduates can support programmes, including through employer vocational-training mechanisms such as Côte d’Ivoire’s FDFP. |
| Sponsorship | Premium buyers, exporters and processors that benefit from a trained workforce can sponsor tracks, laboratories or scholarships. |
| Development partners | Programmes aligned with national vocational-skills goals can attract development-partner support for curriculum, equipment and inclusion. |
13The feedback loop
Academy students learn the protocol’s science.
They intern along the chain and earn their certification.
The best become agronomists, inspectors and technicians in the Contributing Experts Community, or UBTS staff.
More trained people make the protocol cheaper to run and more credible.
More measured lots, more data and more premium trades follow.
Demand grows for more graduates — and more students enrol with partners.
Independence by design: graduates who become contributors are independent in fact. UBTS sets the standard of the deliverable, not the working life of the person. A contributor who attests or inspects a lot is never paid on that lot’s premium.
14Governance and operating model
| Function | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Academic council | Owns curriculum standards, the mapping of tracks to the protocol, and certification rules; includes UBTS protocol leads and partner faculty. |
| Partnerships | Selects and manages partner institutions; negotiates tuition revenue-share agreements. |
| Placement and careers | Runs the internship network across the value chain and the hiring pathway into UBTS and the Contributing Experts Community. |
| Quality and certification | Assesses interns and graduates, awards the UBTS Protocol Practitioner certification, and tracks the acceptance rate of graduates’ attestations. |
The Academy is a Group programme of UBTS International Corp. and is delivered in each country with the local UBTS affiliate — starting with UBTS Côte d’Ivoire SAS.
15Deployment roadmap
| Phase | Objectives and activities |
|---|---|
| Phase 0 · Foundations | Curriculum tracks mapped to the protocol; certification rules; partnership model and agreement template. Shortlist of partner institutions in Côte d’Ivoire; internship host network aligned with the first IA-DP crops. |
| Phase 1 · Côte d’Ivoire | First partner cohorts alongside the IA-DP launch. First internships across cooperatives, processors, exporters and laboratories; first certified practitioners. |
| Phase 2 · Cameroon and West Africa | Academy partnerships accompany the CA-DP launch in Cameroon and expansion from the Ivorian hub. |
| Phase 3 · Anglophone markets | Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania, following the UAA-DP country sequence, with English-language delivery. |
16Impact framework
| Dimension | Indicator |
|---|---|
| Reach | Students enrolled in Academy-partnered programmes; partner institutions active. |
| Practice | Internships completed across the value chain. |
| Certification | UBTS Protocol Practitioners certified, by track. |
| Careers | Graduates active in the Contributing Experts Community; graduates hired by UBTS. |
| Quality | Acceptance rate of attestations produced by Academy graduates. |
| Inclusion | Participation of women across enrolment, internships and certification. |
↗Build it with us
The right conversation now is about the protocol, the launch sequence, and the evidence that will prove premium demand crop by crop. We welcome governments and regulators, premium buyers, academic partners, investors and communities.