Enabling Systems Transformation
Dr. Victor Afari-Sefa, a citizen of Ghana, is an Agricultural Economist and research for development practitioner, with over 20 years post-graduation experience in programmes and projects design, implementation management, feasibility and impact assessment and resource allocation.
He joined ICRISAT in March 2022 as is the Global Research Program Director – Enabling Systems Transformation. with oversight for R&D activities for 6 clusters viz: (i) Technology Adoption and Impact Assessment, (ii) Markets, Institutions and Policies (iii) Agribusiness Innovation Platform (iv) Nutrition, Dietary Behaviour and Smart Foods (v) Gender and Youth, and (vi) Knowledge Management and Capacity Development. Prior to joining ICRISAT in March 2022, he was the West and Central Africa Regional Director of the World Vegetable Center (WorldVeg) from 2017 to 2022 based in Benin. From 2011 to 2017, he was WorldVeg’s Global Theme Leader – Consumption (i.e., comprised of produce postharvest, marketing, nutrition, and monitoring & evaluation R&D interventions) based in Tanzania.
With an extensive experience in performance monitoring and impact assessment of agricultural value chains on smallholder livelihoods. Victor has leadership experience in coordinating agricultural socioeconomic research in sub-Saharan Africa and globally by assessing opportunities and challenges in production systems, analyzing constraints in value chains, and analysing policy in interdisciplinary context.
He has multi-country program/project management experience and has been coordinating multidisciplinary research in agricultural value chains, in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia where he emphasizes on proactive planning processes to attain set deliverables. Victor understands and promotes public-private partnerships as one mechanism to introduce, test and validate agricultural innovations to enhance household resilient production systems, market efficiencies, landscape management, institutional and inclusive policy reforms, and impact investments.
He also has international experience in integrated economic-biophysical optimization modeling of agricultural water use at river basin level. Victor previously worked as a Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Specialist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), where he assisted in developing and implementing the M&E framework of the defunct Sustainable Tree Crops (STCP) Production in 5 West and Central African countries, mainly on cocoa-based systems. He was also previously a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Development Research (ZEF) in Bonn, Germany.
He is a successful author and co-author of several grant proposals and has ~90 peer reviewed articles in international scholarly journals. He has also published several books / book chapters. Victor transitioned into his research career position from an academic background where he taught and researched diverse courses in agricultural and economic development thinking and practice. He remains connected to academia as an adjunct Professor at a few universities in sub-Saharan Africa. Victor holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany.