Eugenia Saini is currently FONTAGRO’s Executive Secretary. FONTAGRO is the Regional Fund for Agricultural Technology. She leads the investment fund and a portfolio of 70 international operations related to science, technology, and innovation for the Latin America and the Caribbean region. She is from Argentina and is an agronomist by training. She holds a doctorate in agricultural sciences, specializing in total factor productivity analysis. One of her seminal works in this field was the estimation of 120 years of TFP for the agricultural sector in Argentina. She is also a National Public Accountant and holds an MS in Food and Agribusiness and an MS in Applied Economics, both from Universidad de Buenos Aires. She has worked in the private and public sectors, both nationally and internationally, especially in multilateral banks. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at Cornell University and, more recently, with the Abshire-Inamori Leadership Academy (AILA) Scholarship at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.
Hellen Wanjiko Waweru, a Kenyan smallholder farmer, shares her farming practices, challenges, and hopes for the future in this documentary short.
By GAP Report team, filming by Moses Irungu
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations suggests that improving women’s access to productivity-enhancing agricultural inputs and knowledge would enable them to produce 20 to 30 percent more food.1 This in turn provides positive impacts on children’s nutrition, health, and education, and could increase national agricultural outputs by as much as 4 percent.2
In honor of International Women’s Day, the Global Agricultural Productivity (GAP) Initiative is sharing the story of Hellen Wanjiko Waweru, a Kenyan small-scale farmer, who describes her farming practices, challenges, and hopes for the future. Hellen was featured in the 2020 GAP Report film, Agricultural Productivity in a Time of Pandemics – Stories from the Front Lines.