Duty Station: Kenya
With over 23 years of hands-on experience, Wanjiku is an economic development expert with a proven track record in delivering inclusive and sustainable pro-poor economic development programmes in Eastern, Southern, and Horn of Africa. In her various roles, Wanjiku has led strategy and intervention formulation and steered the execution of complex, multi-country initiatives delivering inclusive, sustainable and responsible solutions to economic development and food security. Her experience spans multiple agriculture and service sectors including staples and cereals, dairy, export horticulture, livestock (cattle, camel and goat), agricultural inputs, coffee, fruits and nuts, urban water distribution, and tourism.
In addition, she has an excellent appreciation of critical cross cutting thematic areas of gender, youth, climate change and safeguards and has practically mainstreamed these in agribusiness, infrastructure, trade facilitation, humanitarian and private sector engagement programmes as well as led the implementation of targeted programmes and corporate initiatives in these areas.
Wanjiku has extensive experience in programme and project leadership, as well as organisational and functional leadership, managing diverse teams across multiple countries and has had demonstrable success in the areas of results measurement and reporting, financial management, high-level stakeholder engagement, consistently achieved time and budget targets for programmes she has led. She has a dynamic work experience with various organisations and donors such as Deloitte, TechnoServe Inc, Trademark Africa, World Food Programme, Kenya Markets Trust, Micro Enterprise Support Programme Trust, FCDO, USAID, DANIDA, Global Affairs Canada, European Union, Mastercard Foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
She is currently the Program Manager of the Excellence in Agronomy Initiative of the CGIAR under IITA; -a global initiative supporting millions of farming households achieve agronomic gains, through increased productivity and quality per unit of input, resource use efficiency (Nutrients, Labour, Water), soil health, and climate adaptation, in prioritized farming systems by 2030. Then initiative has an emphasis on women and young farmers.
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