Q&A: Women must ‘do the hard stuff’ to stand out
Channel: Science & Development Network
Date: 2021-02-11

Agnes Kalibata, a Rwandan who grew up in Uganda with refugee parents, had an ambition to become a medical doctor or an engineer. 

But as her father turned from teaching to farming to fund his children’s education, little did Kalibata know she would end up being an agricultural scientist.

Now, as president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) since 2014, Kalibata is helping to transform Africa’s agricultural sector through programmes designed to reach millions of smallholders. 

In 2012 she won the Yara Food Prize – now the Africa Food Prize – in 2012, and in 2019 the US-based National Academy of Sciences awarded her the prestigious Public Welfare Medal “for her work to drive Africa’s agricultural transformation through modern science and effective policy, helping to lift more than a million Rwandans out of poverty”.

Kalibata tells SciDev.Net that girls and young women in Africa who aspire to be scientists should be prepared not only to work hard but to do the “hard stuff”.

Tell us about your childhood 

I grew up in Uganda to refugee parents.  Even though my dad had been a teacher in Rwanda, the only thing he could do as a refugee in Uganda was to farm. He was determined to see that his children got better out of life than he did.

As I grew older, I developed a habit for reading, especially in my secondary school where I got to see a library for the first time. This helped me understand that there was a whole other world around me.

Building on my parents’ efforts, I got best student scholarship for secondary education from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) and later obtained a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to study for a master’s at Makerere University in Uganda and then a doctorate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the United States.

How did your journey as a scientist and policymaker begin? 

When I finished my first degree at Uganda’s Makarere University, I joined the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) at the Kawanda Agricultural Research Institute in Uganda as a research assistant. For my master’s, my work was focused on natural control of a major pest of bananas, a major staple crop in Uganda. 

This work continued into my doctorate. I worked on understanding the crop, the pest and biological control options. I traced the banana plant back to its area of origin. From Uganda to Indonesia, Tanzania, Thailand and Vietnam.  By doing research on farmers’ plots in each of these countries, I was able to establish why the banana weevil was a pest in Uganda but not a pest in the area of its origin in South East Asia where it was under the control of natural enemies. 

I cut my postdoctoral work [on banana bacteria wilt] short when I got an opportunity to go to Rwanda and lead a World Bank rural development project in the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources. That was the beginning of my shift from being a scientist to development work and later to policymaking.

How did you become Rwanda’s minister of agriculture and animal resources? 

I held a few positions in Rwanda at the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources before I became a minister from 2008 to 2014.

When I was appointed to lead the agricultural ministry, I had a lot of support from the 
president and the government. This gave me an opportunity to combine and to apply the scientific and technical knowledge I had acquired to work with the whole of government and marshal partnerships that enabled us to move from a country where people went to bed hungry to a food self-sufficient nation in a period of five years.

Because of that, Rwanda is significantly food secure and was able to significantly reduce poverty. Farmers’ yields increased and poverty reduced by 12 per cent in the same period.