Our board

is a rural sociologist with an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management from the University of Ghana. She was Executive Director of the Pan African Organization for Sustainable Development (POSDEV) and is team leader for the Ghana Research and Advocacy Programme. She has worked with national and donor organisations for more than 20 years on social accountability and the organisational development of small and medium enterprises, NGOs and civil society organisations. She is a gender specialist with a solid experience in grants management in compliance with USAID, European Union, CIDA, DANIDA and World Bank. Lawrencia is Chairperson of Access Agriculture.

is the Executive Director of Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE), a coalition of more than thousand education NGOs, researchers and educator groups in Bangladesh. She is a Senior Fellow of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) and Executive Committee Member of the Institute for Inclusive Finance and Development (InM). She is a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Policy Dialogue (CPD), an independent think-tank that focuses on issues critical to developing countries, and is a regular speaker on the right to education and gender justice in national and international fora. Rasheda is Vice-Chair of Access Agriculture.

studied veterinary medicine at the University of Nairobi. He started his career with the Kenyan Government for seven years where he rose to head a district (now County), after which he has worked for the private sector for more than 25 years. He has helped develop the livestock sector to boost food production, food security and alleviate poverty in rural areas. He is a hands-on professional with a solid knowledge of marketing and management in the agricultural industry throughout East Africa.

is a journalist, broadcaster, presenter and discussion leader. Born in Uganda, he studied political science at the University of Amsterdam. He has chaired many discussions about African Agriculture for organisations such as Rabobank and Wageningen University. For 4 and a half years, he was a board member of This is Africa, an interactive digital forum for Africans, by Africans.

has over 30 years’ experience in development co-operation, policy advisory research and capacity building in southern research institutes. He lived for many years in Africa where he worked for United Nation Programme for Development (UNDP) in Mauritania; Médecins Sans Frontières in Kenya; Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) in Ghana and ICARDA in Egypt. He is the co-administrator since 2010 of the online agricultural news platform PAEPARD (Platform for African European Partnership in Agricultural Research for Development) funded by the European Commission. In this capacity, he has been extensively blogging on agricultural issues in Africa and manages an online community of 11,300 members.

graduated from the Burgundy School of Business in Dijon, France in 1982. She is a Chartered Accountant and a member of ONECCA Senegal (Ordre national des Experts Comptables et Comptables Agréés du Sénégal). She started as an Accountant and then Financial Administrator at the Ford Foundation West Africa Regional Office in Dakar from 1984 to 1991. After that, she joined “Research and Support Program for Farmers Associations” that led to the creation of the West Africa Rural Foundation, where she served as Financial and Administrative Director. She founded her own firm MECA in 1999, which has a portfolio of clients mainly comprised of non-profit entities. Oumou is Treasurer of Access Agriculture.