AWARD uses several key approaches to accelerate the careers of African women scientists including:

• Fostering Mentoring Partnerships
• Mentoring model creating ripples
• Building Science Skills
• Plugging the scientific publishing gender gap
• Advanced Science Training
• Building Leadership Skills

Through the AWARD Fellowship, AWARD is investing in accelerating the careers of the continent’s leading women agricultural scientists. The AWARD Fellowship cultivates a growing pool of women to be:

• effective within agricultural research and development institutions supporting the agricultural value chain;
• effective across a range of research disciplines serving the sector;
• responsive to gender issues in the service of women without excluding men; and
• technically competent to generate innovations needed by rural smallholders.

The core intent is to empower women scientists and propel them to leadership across agricultural research and development. (AWARD, 2012, Effective Solutions for Agricultural Development through Empowered African Women Scientists).

Having started with 10 anglophone African countries and lusophone Mozambique, the AWARD Fellowship has since expanded to attain a pan-African outlook, reaching an additional nine francophone African countries. In 2017, three international agricultural research institutes partnered with AWARD to offer the fellowship experience to their scientists, extending our reach beyond Africa for the first time to include fellows from Spain, Bangladesh and Fiji.

AWARD Fellowship Footprint

The AWARD Fellowship has equipped 493 leading women agricultural researchers from 23 countries (20 sub-Saharan and three non-African) with leadership skills and exceptional scientific skills, and has fostered mentoring partnerships among them. In addition, the fellowship has directly benefited 785 individuals who have served as AWARD mentors and fellows’ mentees.

The AWARD Fellows are outstanding, high-potential women agricultural researchers with demonstrated focus on implementing research-based solutions to improve the livelihoods of smallholders. Recent data indicates that AWARD Fellows comprise 23 percent of female agricultural researchers in the 20 SSA countries covered by the AWARD Fellowship.

The AWARD Fellowship delivers multiple-win benefits by simultaneously fostering mentoring partnerships, building science skills and developing leadership skills. Fellows have told us that they have acquired the following benefits from the fellowship:

Fostering mentoring partnerships

Mentoring, whether formal or informal, provides access to information, networks and resources and is identified as a proven and powerful tool for career development, and particularly for retaining women in science.

AWARD Mentoring Model

AWARD Fellowship Purpose Road Map

Evidence has established that “mentoring remains an essential component of effective knowledge transfer, well-planned career development and professional networking.” Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa 2024 (STISA 2024), part of the long-term people-centered AU Agenda 2063, singles out mentoring as a key avenue that will be leveraged for successful implementation of the Agenda. A Rockefeller Foundation study in the United States established that mentoring has a crucial role to play in increasing the number of women in leadership.

Within the AWARD Fellowship, mentoring is an essential component specifically designed to help AWARD Fellows achieve their set goals. AWARD pairs each fellow with a senior respected professional, carefully chosen to match the research interests and career goals of the AWARD Fellow. Mentors may be women or men, and data shows the gender breakdown almost evenly split between the 397 scientists who have benefited as mentors to AWARD Fellows.

Fellows and their mentors attend a five-day facilitated Mentoring Orientation Workshop (MOW) during which they are introduced to planning tools specifically designed to facilitate a successful working relationship and to initiate a supportive and collaborative network among fellows, mentors and the AWARD team. The first of the tools is the mentoring contract—written goals that the mentor and fellow want to achieve in working together and stipulating how they will achieve them. Fellows also develop a career timeline to actively plan their future, a purpose road map (PRM) to guide their progress, and a Development Journal in which they turn their PRM into achievable, clearly defined actions and milestones. These tools support the two-year journey of each AWARD Fellow during the fellowship and beyond.

Other key beneficiaries of the mentoring partnerships are the AWARD Mentors who derive significant benefits by widening their network and are exposed to new ideas and methods from working with fellows and from participating in AWARD training courses designed for them. They get to deepen their understanding of gender issues in agricultural research and development and to enhance their skills in mentoring, listening, and role modeling.

Professor Kamau Ngamau acknowledges that he learned a lot from participating as an AWARD Mentor; in between mentoring sessions he monitored the career progress of his protégé AWARD Fellow, Naomi Chelimo. The transformation in Chelimo was phenomenal, notes Ngamau. At the beginning of the mentoring process, Professor Ngamau helped Chelimo develop her purpose road map during the MOW and describes the process of watching Chelimo fulfill it as enriching and exciting. Ngamau, who is a Professor of Horticulture at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), calls mentoring an eye-opener.

“I stumbled through my career without much guidance, without having a mentor or a role model to guide me.”(A Mentor's Journey - Kamau Ngamau, AWARD Youtube Channel).

He says the tools used in the AWARD mentoring model allow fellows to bring sharp focus to their career and grow in their area, noting that the AWARD Fellowship has great potential in shaping the careers of young scientists beyond the fellowship. He confirms that he has implemented some of the lessons he learned in the process of mentoring.

When AWARD Fellow Catherine Mloza Banda told Pilirani Khoza that she wanted to mentor her, Khoza was skeptical. She went along because she could see that Banda had accomplished a lot as an AWARD Fellow, including being invited to speak at high-level meetings at home and abroad. Banda said she could help Khoza achieve the same. Working together with her mentor, Khoza, a forestry researcher at Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR) in Malawi, submitted her first successful application and was invited to speak at an international meeting. Then Banda helped her prepare her presentation for the conference with such success that fresh invitations to speak at various conferences in different countries followed. Khoza credits the mentorship of Banda with giving her confidence as a speaker and understanding that she can achieve her dreams.

“I consider my experience as an AWARD Fellow’s Mentee to be the launch of my success,” says Khoza, describing the year of mentorship as “transformative”.

In 2017, she participated in AWARD’s inaugural GAIA AgTech Innovation Challenge for Southern and Central Africa. At the GAIA Challenge, Khoza introduced the organization she founded at LUANAR, Bunda Female Students Organisation (BUFESO), which empowers women and girls to choose agriculture as a profession supporting them with funding and mentoring. Separately, with funding from Young Professionals for Agriculture (YPARD), she is also implementing career-building and role-modeling programs in rural secondary schools in Malawi, and received the 2018 Queen’s Young Leader’s Award for her work in the community.

The AWARD mentoring model creating ripples

The success of the AWARD mentoring model has inspired various other organizations to adopt mentoring as a key component of career development for their target groups and to embed mentoring based on the AWARD model into their activities. This has an important multiplier effect in advancing the AWARD agenda and promoting linkages and partnerships as we share our knowledge and experience.

Examples of some institutions that have adopted the AWARD model include:

• The Young Professionals for Agricultural Development (YPARD) uses mentoring as a key activity to deliver its objectives. They partnered with AWARD to develop a toolkit based on the AWARD Fellowship mentoring and lessons learned from a year-long pilot of YPARD Mentoring Program initiated in Kenya in June 2015. The pilot included 15 YPARD members comprising farmers, students, entrepreneurs, young scientists and extension workers from across the country. Mentors and mentees met during a three-day orientation workshop facilitated by an AWARD trainer.

The newly released toolkit – Coordinating a Mentoring Program: A Toolkit for Agriculture, Forestry, Landscapes and Other Sectors - is a synthesis of learnings and resources from mentoring programs implemented by AWARD and other partners. It is designed to have an international outlook and reach, developed as an online tool integrating virtual technologies to mediate the mentoring process. All coordination takes place through this online platform, reducing the need for physical meetings. The tool allows mentor and mentee pairs to connect regardless of their geographical location.

This intergenerational support ensures that young men and women’s voices are heard when shaping the future of sustainable food systems, and that the need for successive generations of agricultural scientists, leaders and agribusiness champions will be met. The growing number of institutions that have embedded mentoring into their activities based on the AWARD model has a multiplier effect in advancing our agenda and promoting linkages and partnerships as we share our knowledge and experience.

• Ghana’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) nominated 46 scientists, evenly representing men and women and almost equally split between junior and senior scientists to be part of a yearlong mentoring process. At a training session held in June 2015 led by AWARD trainers, participants were introduced to the AWARD mentoring model and equipped with tools and skills to execute the mentoring process. Prior to the training, AWARD trainers worked with three CSIR staff for two days introducing them to mentoring and tailoring the course to the Ghanaian context, the CSIR organizational culture and institutional needs.
• Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) Tanzania partnered with AWARD to embed an MOW for junior and newly appointed staff into its system. The model used was based on AWARD’s mentoring initiative. The first round of mentoring was conducted in September 2013 with 23 mentoring pairs participating. A second round of mentoring was implemented in July 2016 with support from AWARD.

Building science skills

Before they can be effective agricultural research leaders, AWARD Fellows must first be scientists of uncompromising quality. As such, strengthening the scientific research skills of the fellows is the second significant unit of the AWARD Fellowship. Building and sustaining a strong, effective talent pool of agricultural scientists is key to improving the livelihoods of those dependent on agriculture. By building the fellows’ science skills, AWARD expands their world of science, facilitates their access to the latest methodologies and technologies and builds their professional networks. AWARD trains fellows in science writing and supports them in advancing their scientific skills.

Plugging the scientific publishing gender gap

Studies, have shown that women are less likely than men to publish in scientific journals and when they do publish they are less likely to be the lead investigator. The underrepresentation of women in scientific research is not unique to Africa. It is a global phenomenon that women publish fewer research articles than men and are less likely to collaborate internationally on research papers due to lower levels of mobility.

A recent study concluded that the gender gap in science publishing “will not close without further reforms in education, mentoring and academic publishing.”

While huge gender gaps are recorded in science publishing, the career progression of researchers depends largely not only on how many publications they produce, but also on the quality of the publications. The well-worn phrase “publish or perish” is a blatant reality. The lower numbers of women-authored publications therefore have far-reaching consequences.

Besides the increased emphasis for researchers to increase their communication and engagement with non-technical audiences, it is still paramount that they produce high-quality publications.

AWARD builds the science writing skills of its fellows by providing them with intensive training courses in scientific writing and publishing. AWARD Fellows produced 960 journal articles during their fellowship period (Rounds 1 to 7 of the AWARD Fellowship). (AWARD's consolidated data) While this is impressive, it certainly is not sufficient, with data continuing to indicate that women contribute to less than 30 percent of scientific publications. International collaborations among scientists have been identified as one way to close this gap.

Dr. Joy Odimegwu was a high school teacher in Lagos, Nigeria when she won an AWARD Fellowship 10 years ago. She was keen to build her science record and applied for advanced science training, a competitive component of the fellowship package. When her application was rejected she followed up with AWARD to understand the reasons for her unsuccessful application. On learning that her proposal had weaknesses, she purposed to focus on this draft during the Research Proposal Writing Skills training. The rewritten proposal was submitted and accepted by The Third World Organization for Women in Science, giving her a fully paid scholarship for a PhD. Third World Organization for Women in Science has been renamed the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD).

“That was the turning point for me in the fellowship and in my career,” she notes.

It taught her the strengthening role of feedback and discussion and disciplined her to pay attention to detail in presenting science proposals. She is now a lecturer at the University of Lagos and uses her science writing skills to raise funds for her research.

Advanced Science Training

Advanced Science Training (AST) is part of the “building science skills” component of the AWARD Fellowship. Through AST, AWARD Fellows are selected to participate in research placements with partner institutions around the world. AST helps AWARD Fellows build and expand the solid scientific skills and knowledge in their areas of expertise, which are needed to produce the technological innovations and advances that contribute to positive sustainable impacts in agricultural research. Successful applicants for AST are placed in the world’s leading scientific research institutions. Over the last decade, 44 such institutions from 25 countries have partnered with AWARD to host research placements for fellows.

A recent study called Advanced Science Training: A decade of strengthening the research skills of African women through global partnerships, 2018—jointly conducted by AWARD and the U.K.-based John Innes Centre (https://www.jic.ac.uk/)—revealed that overall, a majority of the AWARD Fellows who participated in AST experienced significant improvements in their skills. The study explored seven specific skill areas to determine the long-term impact that these had on the careers of AWARD Fellows, and in their institutions and communities.

Synthesized results of the AST impact study indicate that AST had great impact on the fellows, specifically in increasing technical and personal development skills (68 percent and 67.8 percent respectively) followed by growth in individual capacity building at 54.5 percent.

The AST component has been proven to have a transformative effect not only on individual women scientists, but also on their institutions and countries.

Before the AWARD Fellowship in 2008, Professor of Mycology Sheila Okoth did not have the capacity to fully conduct aflatoxin research, due to lack of equipment and limited skills. During her AST placement at Stellenbosch University, she acquired skills and necessary protocols to set up an aflatoxin laboratory. AST enabled her to acquire basic equipment to test for aflatoxin, a Reveal AccuScan III. Armed with newly acquired scientific skills, the protocols and the single piece of equipment, Okoth returned home with the objective of establishing an aflatoxin-testing laboratory at the University of Nairobi. She developed a joint proposal with her AST supervisor, which was successful and enabled her to purchase more advanced equipment, an ELISA reader. Okoth has since established a fully equipped functional laboratory that is a national referral laboratory for aflatoxin testing in Kenya and that is attracting collaborations with various global research institutes, universities, and public- and private-sector organizations. The laboratory is a recognized center for Aflatoxin Proficiency Testing and Control in Africa, Asia, Americas and Europe (APTECA) and runs aflatoxin testing and qualification workshops for African trainees. The World Food Programme tests grains destined for humanitarian aid at this laboratory. These partnerships attract considerable funding to the University.

Professor Okoth is an external researcher for the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT). She is an internationally renowned expert in mycology, an authority on aflatoxin in East Africa and is currently President of the African Society for Mycotoxicology. Professor Okoth had not engaged with any of the institutions mentioned before her AST placement.

Building leadership skills

There is wide appreciation for the need to make the agricultural sector more gender-responsive, and concerted action from several actors is required. At the global level, United Nations SDG 8 seeks to promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all. Equally, the African Union Commission’s Agenda 2063 emphasizes the need for inclusive growth, gender equality and youth employment to propel African countries to be among the best performers in global quality of life measures. These principles have been cascaded at the regional and national development blueprints.

The success of these agendas relies heavily on the cultivation of a new generation of African leaders in food and agriculture. That leadership will be even more effective when women are highly represented, especially by those technically competent to generate the innovations needed by smallholders. The AWARD Fellowship is explicitly designed to support women agricultural scientists as they increase their visibility, and to empower them to serve as effective leaders within their research teams, institutions and communities.

Through AWARD’s leadership training courses, AWARD Fellows learn to navigate organizational gender barriers, leverage team talents, manage conflicts and appropriately use their influence. Leadership training supports them to build alliances and take risks, promote gender-sensitive policies and practices, and influence their institutions and communities on behalf of rural women smallholders.

Significant career progress has been recorded among the AWARD Fellows with most of the them occupying leadership positions at various agricultural research institutions. Preliminary results of a longitudinal survey conducted in August 2018 found that 68 percent of respondents have been promoted to senior or mid-senior leadership positions or appointed to policy-influencing positions since their participation in the AWARD Fellowship.

Developing capacity to lead differently at different levels

Dr. Ebinimi Joe Ansa is the Special Adviser to the Governor of Bayelsa State, Nigeria and Assistant Director for Research, NIOMR, Department of Aquaculture. In this high-level role, Dr. Ansa has direct influence on government decision-making. She has played a central role in promoting the idea of a Fish Village at Yenegwe, Yenagoa Local Government Area. The Fish Village, designed to create employment, lift incomes and engage the local community in making Bayelsa State a net exporter of fish, is built on 127 hectares of land contributed by the state government. The government built 500 fathom-deep fish ponds on the land. Ponds are run and managed by 4,000 members of various local community groups with special provision made for women and youth groups. A hatchery, feed manufacturing mill and fish processing plant have been completed and will be run by a private-sector company under a private-public partnership agreement. Since her AWARD Fellowship in 2009, Dr. Ansa has also taken on roles as a member of the Aquaculture Working Group of the African Union – Inter African Bureau of Animal Resources, and is the coordinator of the country chapter of Nigerian AWARD alumni NiWARD.

Professor Fetien Abera, AWARD Fellow 2010, is another case that highlights the impact of individual leadership training on a home institution.

Professor Abera is the only female plant breeder in Ethiopia and was the first female lecturer employed by Mekelle University in Ethiopia, 24 years ago. For most of those years she remained focused on her research in plant breeding. She says that before her AWARD Fellowship experience in 2010 she regarded gender and leadership as political issues that would potentially taint her career as a researcher. The AWARD Fellowship experience changed her perspective: she began to engage the university leadership in discussions and accepted leadership appointments.

“I have become more of an advocate, and am proactive for women in science,”

she says, adding that she uses her status to advocate for women and provide incentives to young women scientists. Shortly after the fellowship, she accepted a position to establish and lead the Institute of Environment, Gender and Development Studies at the university and stayed on as director for five years. She was appointed full professor and has incorporated gender-responsive research in her approach to plant breeding. In 2016 she was appointed Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Mekelle University, the first Ethiopian woman to hold such position. She uses her status to advocate for the role of women in science and provides incentives to young women scientists.

These women also interface with communities; in Professor Okoth’s case she works closely with local millers, while Professor Abera works with grain-growing cooperatives across Ethiopia. For sustainable and long-term transformation, actors along the value chain must be able to access appropriate innovation that help them respond to Africa’s unique challenges. AWARD equips its fellows with the skills to facilitate interactions and foster partnerships with communities at all levels.

Dr. Flower Ezekiel Msuya says the leadership training she received during her AWARD Fellowship period in 2014-2016 gave her the skills she needed to expand her work.

“This is when I actually started to work, to go out, to reach out to get additional funding for experiments,” she says, singling out the training she received on building networks and partnerships.

Dr. Msuya, who is the chairperson and facilitator at the Zanzibar Seaweed Cluster Initiative (ZaSCI), an initiative of the Pan African Competitiveness Forum, says 90 percent of seaweed farmers in Zanzibar Island are women and they have taken up most farming sites. Increased productivity is the only way that farmers can boost earnings from seaweed farming. She has adapted the tubular net technology to enable the 25,000 seaweed farmers in Zanzibar to plant seaweed in deeper waters, which will improve the quality and volume of their harvest and increase their incomes.

Dr. Msuya obtained a series of grants and brought in the local government to support value addition industries and empower the community with knowledge. Partnership with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) brought in international expertise to train farmers and entrepreneurs while the Milele Zanzibar Foundation, an association of Zanzibari people in diaspora, came in to mobilize funds that ZaSCI uses to support small value addition industries. Dr. Msuya’s work is gaining attention and she has been featured in global news reports that highlight her research, which increasingly touches the area of climate change as seaweed species disappear.

Dr. Jane Ambuko’s work on postharvest handling of highly perishable foods is revolutionizing Kenya’s agriculture and getting government attention. Her innovative cool boxes have been adopted and scaled out to smallholder farmers in Makueni and Embu counties, saving farmers millions of shillings in postharvest losses.

Ambuko, a 2013 AWARD Fellow, works with mango farmers in Makueni county.

For years she watched them lose as much as 50 percent of their harvest each season, and was aggravated by knowing the solution is “as simple as managing temperature.”

Given the twin problems of the high cost of cold room installation and the unreliable power supply in rural areas, Ambuko developed the cool box, which relies on water evaporation and is specifically designed to extend the shelf life of perishable fruits and vegetables. Ambuko, a horticultural scientist and Senior Lecturer at the University of Nairobi, says postharvest food loss is the most neglected part of the agricultural supply chain. She quotes the FAO’s alert that Africa loses the equivalent of $4 billion worth of grain due to poor postharvest handling and one third of all food produced worldwide never reaches consumers. In 2013 Ambuko was appointed by the FAO Committee on Food Security to the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) for her efforts to reduce postharvest losses.

Lessons from the AWARD Fellowship: A Shared Conversation for Agricultural Research

The AWARD Fellowship has stimulated a new pulse in agricultural research and development between the so-called global south and north, inspiring movement toward a shared conversation about shared challenges.

Our partnership with an international network of institutions that share a commitment to inclusive agricultural research and development has seen a community of interest strengthen and grow around the AWARD Fellowship. This community is creating new pathways for delivering the benefits from agricultural research and development to resource-poor farmers and consumers in keeping with recommendations from the first Global Conference on Agricultural Research and Development (GCARD). The GCARD meeting identified the need for a collective focus on key priorities, increased capacity to share and make use of agricultural knowledge, better demonstration of the return from research as well as effective partnerships between research institutions and the communities they serve. It requires a change in systems, institutional structures and processes of collaboration and partnerships to turn the focus on development impact and outcomes.

Through the AWARD Fellowship we have made entries into geographic silos in which agricultural research and development is often practiced, opening opportunities for exchange. This new sphere allows scientists who rarely interacted before to collaborate in new ways. It generates abundant opportunities for the transfer of knowledge and skills. It demonstrates the possibilities of working together, leveraging scarce state-of-the-art technologies across the world and bringing these to bear on real world problems affecting communities.

The gains of the AWARD Fellowship are not only one-way. As leading scientists from the continent take on the roles of AWARD Fellows, mentors and trainers, they have been ambassadors, bringing intellectual rigor from the African continent to their dialogue with scientists in host institutions and beyond. They are visible as they shape and influence global policy and practices through their appointment to serve on regional and international research and policy institutions and think tanks. They add fresh perspective, bringing their unique experiences shaped by their cultures, indigenous knowledge, local approaches, priorities and concerns to a global platform.

Benefits of the AWARD Fellowship

AWARD Fellows have told us they have grown in the following ways:

From this expanded vantage point, scientists, in both the north and the south, now value their research in the context of global concerns including food security, global trade in food and agricultural produce and climate change. Assessment of the AWARD Fellowship further demonstrates that the scientific community is finding convergence in their research goals and increasingly working together on joint grant-writing and fund-raising proposals for research with individuals and with institutions.

With the introduction of women scientists from Asia, the AWARD Fellowship also makes available opportunities for scientists from developing countries to have a conversation of their own on agricultural research and development.