Dear friends,

My team and I are excited to share with you some highlights of what has been a fulfilling and rewarding year at AWARD.

We are excited to announce that the call for the next cohort of the One Planet Fellowship is now open for applications and will close on March 31, 2020. This follows a successful launch of the inaugural cohort of One Planet Fellowship, consisting of  45 outstanding scientists from 12 African countries, selected from an impressive pool of 1523 applicants. We are also thrilled to announce that the European Union and Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) joined BNP Paribas Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, committing additional funding for this initiative. These new partnerships have seen the One Planet Fellowship grow into a US$19.2M initiative that will accelerate the careers of up to 630 early-career African and European young scientists who are committed to innovating gender-responsive climate adaptation solutions for Africa’s smallholder farmers.

Our flagship career accelerator for women scientists continues and this year we customized the AWARD Fellowship model for the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR). We also customized AWARD mentoring programs at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB) in Nigeria, the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) in Tanzania and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Ghana. We further extended our focus on women scientists to the emerging next generation of African women scientists, through our partnership with the International Veterinary Vaccinology Network (IVVN) to pilot the African Schools Outreach Programme in Kenya and Nigeria.

Together with a consortium of six partners, we convened the 2019 Global Forum on Women in Scientific Research (GoFoWiSeR) which brought together actors to  catalyze connections and strengthen partnerships toward improving the numbers and experiences of women in science. The partners included The African Academy of Sciences (The AAS), UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the UK Department of International Development (DfID) East Africa Research Hub, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Regional Scholarship and Innovation Fund of the Partnership for Skills in Applied Sciences (PASET), Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF).

What is the nexus between gender and leadership in Africa? What are the trends and opportunities for bridging the gender gap in leadership? In chapter three of the 2019 Annual Trends Outlook Report (ATOR), we connect the dots between the gender gap in African women’s political leadership to the low numbers of women in agricultural research. Lead author and AWARD Deputy Director for Programs, Dr. Michèle Mbo’o-Tchouawou spoke at the report’s launch at the ReSAKSS Annual Conference held in Lomé, Togo.

We are proud to partner with SecondMuse to amplify the Rockefeller Foundation’s Food System Vision Prize, an initiative that seeks to facilitate the creation and realization of concrete and actionable Visions of food systems that deliver sustainable, nourishing diets by 2050. The Vision Prize also aims to amplify the discourse on the state and the future of the world’s many food systems. We encourage you to share your compelling vision for the future of our food system through the call that is now open until January 31, 2020.

This year has also seen the election of a new chairperson for our Steering Committee, Professor Sanni Lateef. Professor Lateef will be deputized by Dr. Jemimah Njuki and we also anticipate announcing new members to the Steering Committee in the coming months.

Remember, you can stay up-to-date with our latest news and opportunities by visiting our website. We also share news updates and run online discussions on our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram pages and you can invite your colleagues and friends to subscribe to our mailing list.

Happy holidays!

Dr. Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg
Director, AWARD