Dr. Jemimah Micere Njuki

Dr Jemimah Njuki is Senior Program Specialist at Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) where she develops and manages projects on the empowerment of women and girls working in agriculture. She chairs the Steering Committee of the African Women in Agriculture Research and Development, a program empowering women researchers to develop their scientific and leadership skills. She is also an advisor to the UN Women Regional Office for Eastern and Southern Africa.
For the last 18 years she has carried out gender research, managed women’s economic empowerment programs in Africa and Asia, trained researchers, NGO staff and extension officers on how to integrate gender in their work and to work with women smallholder farmers. She has worked in various countries including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Ghana, the Gambia, Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, DR Congo, India, Bangladesh, Canada and the US.
From 2003 to 2009, she worked at the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture linking smallholder farmers to markets, training men and women on good agricultural practices and working with men to support women’s empowerment through community dialogue and engaging male champions of change. During this time, she trained over 500 researchers, practitioners and extension agents on approaches for empowering women smallholder producers. In 2009, she started the first ever gender research program at the International Livestock Research Institute in recognition of the role that livestock plays as an asset for women. In 2012, the started and managed the Women in Agriculture Program at CARE USA working with over 50,000 smallholder women farmers in Africa and Asia.
She has co-edited two books. ‘Women and livestock in Eastern and Southern Africa’, and the other on ‘Transforming Gender and Food Systems in the Global South’. She has also published widely in international journals. In 2015, she founded and is the current Editor in Chief of the Journal of Gender, Agriculture and Food Security. The journal aims to improve the quality of gender research and encourage researchers from global south to contribute to scientific leadership on issues of gender and women’s empowerment in the agriculture sector. She is an Aspen New Voices 2017 Fellow. She has used fellowship platform to raise awareness of the value the empowerment of women and girls, financial inclusion for women, gender based violence, and ending FGM. Her articles including where they have been published can be found on https://medium.com/me/stories/public
To build the next generation of women researchers and gender advocates, Jemimah started the Million Girls Trust, which provides computers to underprivileged schools in rural Kenya and scholarships for secondary and college education for girls from underprivileged girls. She is also supporting local community organizations and nongovernmental organizations to work better and monitor their impacts on empowering women through a center she co-founded in 2011, The Africa Centre for Gender, Social Research and Impact Assessment.