Edward Mabaya, M.S. ’98, Ph.D. ’03, grew up on a small family farm in rural Zimbabwe. Now associate director of the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture & Development (CIIFAD) and a research associate at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Mabaya focuses his efforts on sustainable agriculture to provide food security in Africa.
Mabaya will get a boost in those efforts as a recently named New Voices Fellow. The program run by The Aspen Institute is designed to amplify the voices of experts from the developing world in the global development discussion.
Under the program, the fellows will receive intensive media training to help them reach a broader global audience through both traditional and new media. Mabaya joins 20 other leading scientists, educators, doctors, policy experts, activists, and economists from around the world in the fellowship program to bring unique perspectives to international development.
Mabaya knows of the daily struggle experienced by many people in the developing world. As he recounts, “I grew up as the sixth of ten children born to smallholder farmers in rural Zimbabwe. In the 1980s, my parents adopted new hybrid maize varieties along with fertilizers and better crop husbandry techniques. As a result, yields rose from under one ton to over six tons per hectare and we moved from subsistence to small-scale commercial farming. My parents used the extra income to send all ten children to school, which, in my case, opened the way to attending university.”
Mabaya’s research interests include food marketing and distribution, seed systems and the role of efficient agricultural markets in Africa’s economic development. His latest project – The African Seed Access Index – seeks to promote the creation and maintenance of enabling environments for competitive seed systems serving smallholder farmers.
Learn more about CIIFAD’s mission at ciifad.cals.cornell.edu
