Professional Experience:
Dr Victor Afari-Sefa, a citizen of Ghana, is an Agricultural Economist and Research for Development Practitioner, with ~24 years post-graduation experience in research implementation and management; programmes and projects design, implementation management; project feasibility, monitoring, evaluation, learning and impact assessment; and resource allocation. He joined ICRISAT in March 2022 as the Global Research Program Director – Enabling Systems Transformation with oversight for R&D activities for six 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. Between December 2023 and June 2024, he was given additional responsibility as Acting Deputy Director General – Research at ICRIAT, where he coordinated research across all 3 global research programs. 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, where he as tasked with setting up a regional office in Benin and country offices in Ghana and Nigeria from the scratch. 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. He has 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, analysing 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, evaluate and validate agricultural innovations to enhance household resilient production systems, market efficiencies inclusive agribusiness models, landscape management, institutional and inclusive policy reforms, and impact investments. He also has international experience in integrated economic-biophysical optimization modelling of agricultural water use at river basin level. Victor previously worked as a Monitoring, Evaluation & 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 Program (STCP) in 5 West and Central African countries on cocoa-based systems. He was previously also a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Development Research (ZEF) in Bonn, Germany. Victor is a successful author and co-author of several grant proposals and has published over 90 peer reviewed articles in international scholarly journals. Victor transitioned into his research career position from an academic background where he taught and researched diverse courses in agribusiness management. 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 and a complementary executive education in leadership and management provided by the Harvard Business School, Boston, USA.