Alliance for Science expands mission with $10 million reinvestment

To that end, Patricia Nanteza, a 2015 AfS Global Leadership Fellow from Uganda, will assume leadership of the alliance’s innovative training programs. Over the past six years, the AfS has trained 796 science communicators from 48 countries through international short courses and its flagship 12-week fellows program, which historically has been held on Cornell’s Ithaca campus.

Nanteza will lead efforts to develop online and face-to-face training programs that reflect the organization’s expanded mission.   

“An African-led, Africa-based training program will help us deepen our presence and engagement on the continent,” said Nanteza, who’s a science writer for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. “We are responding to our partners’ requests to offer more demand-driven training and we see this move as strengthening our real-time collaboration with key partners in Africa.”

Since its founding, the Cornell Alliance for Science grown into a vibrant international network committed to achieving food security, environmental sustainability, resilient communities and improved rural livelihoods through the adoption of science-based policies and practices.

The Alliance will continue to amplify pro-science voices from Africa, South Asia and Latin America through an expanded presence at international events, such as meetings convened by the Food and Agriculture Organization and United Nations.

“International policy discussions are too often dominated by anti-science groups from the global North,” said AfS Global Policy Lead Pablo Orozco, a 2016 AfS Fellow from Guatemala who has mobilized Fellows and others to participate in key international gatherings. “It’s so important that scientists, smallholder farmers and social justice activists from developing nations have a voice in decisions that profoundly affect their food security and quality of life.”

The re-investment also provides new funding for the Dhaka-based Farming Future Bangladesh, an AfS initiative working to improve food security and nutrition in South Asia under the direction of Arif Hossain, a 2015 AfS Fellow from Bangladesh.

“Agricultural innovation should unite us all in the critical challenge of feeding a growing world, and we are collaborating with faith leaders, health care workers, farmers, scientists and youth groups to share accurate, timely information,” Hossain said. “We all share the goal of ending hunger and improving nutrition among the people of Bangladesh,” he said.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the critical need to address food security by giving smallholder farmers, many of them women, access to the innovative tools that can help them succeed and prosper in an increasingly unpredictable and hostile climate,” Evanega said. “This new investment in Cornell’s Alliance for Science reinforces the importance of working together to find inclusive, science-based solutions to the grave problems facing humanity and our planet.”