Contributors
EurAfrican 2023
Agnes Kalibata
President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)
Rwanda
Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General, Agnes Kalibata serves with the United Nations and key partners to provide leadership, guidance and strategic direction for the 2021 Food Systems Summit. Agnes Kalibata is responsible for outreach and cooperation with key leaders, including governments, to ensure that the Summit serves as a catalytic process in the “Decade of Action” to improve food systems around the world to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement.
Since 2014, Kalibata has also served as President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), where he leads the organization’s efforts with public and private partners to ensure a secure and prosperous Africa through rapid and sustainable agricultural growth, improving the productivity and livelihoods of millions of African smallholder farmers.
Prior to joining AGRA in September 2014, she was Rwanda’s Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources (MINAGRI) from 2008 to 2014, where she led programs that took her country from food insecure to food secure status. The progress achieved by her work has earned her recognition from other countries as a reference point in the transformation of the agricultural sector.
She has held several other leadership positions, such as: Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Rwanda. She also works for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture of Uganda and several other agricultural development organizations.
Agnes Kalibata also serves on the Global Commission on Adaptation, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition.
- in Entomology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, she also received two honorary doctorates: in 2018 from the University of Liege and the following year from McGill University.
She was awarded the Yara Prize, now the Africa Food Prize, in 2012. Most recently, in 2019, she won the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal for the contribution of her work in driving Africa’s agricultural transformation through modern science and effective policies, thereby improving farmers’ livelihoods.
Throughout her career, Agnes Kalibata has established herself as a distinguished agricultural scientist, policy maker, and thought leader.