So hello, good afternoon. I'm Dr. Maria Elisa Christie.
I'm director of women and gender in
international development here at Virginia Tech
at our center for international research education and development.
So welcome to our first speaker for our discussion series I think somebody just
turned another mic for our women and gender development
discussion series we have a very special speaker
and in collaboration with CALS college of ag and life sciences
but I wanted to go over some details first okay so first of all
well I do want to welcome Dr. Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg,
joining us from Kenya today and Dr. Tom Thompson the
CALS associate dean and director of the CALS global program will introduce her
as soon as I finish here. So I'd like to begin today by
acknowledging that this event is being held on the traditional lands of the
Tutelo and Monacan people who are the original custodians of this
land that Virginia Tech is built on. We also want to go ahead and
announce our second discussion senior speaker we'll have one each month so
we'll still have February March and April and that will be on
February 15th. That will be Dr. Claudia Radel,
associate dean of Quinney college of natural resources at Utah State
and she'll be speaking about the gender dynamics of conditional cash transfers.
That event will be held here but it's on a Thursday at 12:30 to 1:30
and that calendar is on our website on the WGD website
and you can talk to any of us after this if you need help figuring that out and I
also put several copies of our calendar in the back that has a whole calendar
for the semester you can take one. Okay this presentation will last about
30 minutes so we have time about 20 minutes for discussion
questions and answers and then we have a reception to follow
which you're all invited to. We have a sign up sheet uh Putu do
you have the two flip the two things okay we're gonna send a sign up
sheet if you haven't already signed it please sign it and put your email
address and let us know if you want to be added to our listserv where you'll
get announcements about our future discussion series.
In any case we want to know how many people are here if your students faculty
because we do use our records as an opportunity to raise money to bring
speakers like Wanjiru who's flown in from Kenya.
so um all right and after this talk we also send out a
short email survey that's why we want your email address it'll take you
three to five minutes to fill out and again we use that to
track how important useful other recommendations for
topics for a discussion series so Dr. Thompson will introduce our speaker
thank you
Thank you Dr. Christie and it is a real thrill to see everyone here.
We should have gotten a bigger room I think, next time
we'll do that but thank you so much for coming.
As Dr. Christie mentioned this particular lecture is a collaboration
between the center for international research
education and development and the global programs office of the college of
agriculture and life sciences. This began about seven months ago
when I was attending a conference that was sponsored by
the center for international research education
and development here at Virginia Tech, and
Dr. Kamau-Rutenberg was a speaker and a very dynamic speaker as you'll soon
find out and had a chance to meet her and we
began to talk about bringing her to Virginia Tech, so it took
us about seven months but we're really thrilled to have her here on campus
and I think she has a very timely topic to share with us and obviously there's a
lot of interest so let me just read a brief bio
and then i'll hand it directly to her.
Dr. Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg is the director of African women in
agricultural research and development which is called AWARD.
AWARD is working toward inclusive agriculture driven prosperity for the
African continent by strengthening the production and
dissemination of agricultural research and innovation
that is more gender responsive. Born in Kenya, Dr. Kamau-Rutenberg holds
a PhD and a master's degree in political science from the University of Minnesota
and a bachelor of arts degree in politics and a doctorate
from Whitman College in Washington state. Dr. Kamau-Rutenberg has received
widespread recognition for her work including being honored as a White House
champion of change, named one of the 100 most influential
Africans by New African magazine, recognized as a Ford Foundation champion
of democracy and named one of Kenya's top 40 women
under 40 among other recognitions. So we're glad to have you Wanjiru.
Hi everyone, hi everyone [Audience: hello] It's interesting I've
realized there's some cultural differences
like in Africa when you say hello to an audience you do
actually expect a hello back and I realize in the US people don't actually
greet people so hi everyone.
all right so this is what I'm going to try and do
I am going to I've got a powerpoint deck I'm going to try and go through that
relatively quickly to my target is to allow
us about 40 minutes to have a conversation
as you heard from my bio I have had multiple multiple lives multiple careers
started off as a political scientist in between
ran a leadership incubator for girls and young women
working in Kenya across and now across east Africa
and now I run AWARD, working in the ag research sector
so there's a lot of things we could talk about
and I have never been known to be short of an opinion
so how about we do this does this move things forward and back no it doesn't oh
shoot what did i do i made it red ah okay
i don't think that's what that does
all right so that's me when do you know award
we know what did i do i'm sorry i'll just turn it off
turn things off um how do i make this go forward
oh dear what did i do how do i make the slides go for it
oh look at this okay great
okay looks like we're gonna have that little blue thing throughout
oh yes let's talk agriculture how many of you in the agriculture
field show of hands okay good um it means not all of us are in
agriculture so some of what i say is to be new and perhaps even
interesting um agriculture is really important to
Africa agriculture is really important to
African economies you cannot talk about African economies
without talking about agriculture so for example after the government
sector the agricultural sector provides the
largest number of stable jobs on the continent in countries like
Burundi, Burkina Faso, and Madagascar more than 80 percent of the labor force
is in the agricultural sector
agriculture on the whole accounts for about 32 percent
of all of Africa's gross domestic products
now we export a lot of gold and diamonds and copper
so for agriculture to comprise 32 percent of the average GDP
it's a huge sector again you cannot talk about african economies
ending poverty in africa without getting serious about
agriculture so um and that may for me that makes it
really interesting now as was mentioned before in one of my
other lives i was in academia and i taught courses i was
an assistant professor of politics at university of san francisco
and i taught courses on african politics international aid and development
and i gave a lot of pop quizzes so pop quiz here we go
okay where is agriculture ranked amongst the sectors with highest
growth potential in africa out of the top
i'm gonna make it easy it's in the top five but what rank do you think it is of
all the sectors that have the highest growth potential
where is agriculture
two one oh come on people it's a quiz wake up wake up wake up one one
two someone did some research oh shoot that i cut that off agriculture
is actually second and there's a report from ernst
young the agriculture sector is the second highest growth potential sector
um for the for the continent next pop quiz question at
what rate is africa's agriculture sector sector projected to grow until 2013.
the agricultural sector grew is growing projected to grow at a particular rate
every year until 2030. what do you think that
rate of growth is projected to be
17 that's a little too high seven percent are you getting close
i'm hearing ten five two people what rate is the american economy
growing at right now i'm just asking i can't read it
is it anywhere near four it's closer to three
right the american economy is growing at three percent so let's
let's adjust so let me ask again at what rate is
africa's agriculture sector projected to grow
every year until the year 2030. 1.85 all right
yeah six percent
right um
after consumer the consumer goods agriculture 220 billion dollars in
revenue 2008 if we grow at six percent every year
from 2008 to the year 2030 these are projections
by the international money monetary fund and the world bank
we're gonna i mean the agriculture sector
in addition to employ here's the point of making the agriculture sector in
addition to employing a lot of our population is
also going to be one of the fastest if not the fastest growing sector on the
continent a lot of us get obsessed with uh
exporting minerals and not exporting gold the diamond
platinum and everything else we're discovering digging up and selling
abroad but the agriculture sector in addition to creating that employment
which if you understand the youth bulge that we have on the continent with
something like what sixty percent of the population being
under the age of
15 i want to say does anyone have those numbers on the youth pound
i mean we have an incredible young and an incredibly young population
um that we're gonna need to feed and those young people are in a couple
of years gonna start making babies so we'll have even more
mouths to feed again the what i'm trying to say here is
a scene of an agriculture sector that's
absolutely critical to economy to our economies critical to ending
poverty in terms of jobs creation wealth creation and also to food
security and if you think about what food
insecurity does to uh relative to conflicts we cannot as a
continent afford to ignore agriculture so we got it agriculture is
super important right great so all of you all need to like
what shift your majors to uh just good okay um
my husband loves puns so i had to get this in there for him
much of the agriculture sector on the continent
is growing at rapid pace and is an incredibly important sector for us
we are actually out as a continent at a fork in the road
um and there's a couple of critical decisions that the continent needs to
make about what kind of agriculture sector we
want for ourselves um isn't that so cool
i thought it was funny okay couple of questions
that represent that fork in the road first question are we going to have an
agriculture sector that grows african prosperity
or is the african agriculture sector going to
end up as a enhanced means of extracting the natural resources of african soils
and exporting them abroad this would not be the first time that
growth in a sector actually leaves africans more
impoverished than not allow me to share this
does anyone know what this is oh it says right there
this is a map of the major railways uh rails the the rail system on the
continent does someone know do you notice
something distinct about this network of rails
yes sir they're all along the coast of africa
they're all leading to the coast now where in the world would you build a
real network that isn't a network on a continent
why might you do that
it's to export this is our critical infrastructure was built to extract
resources from the center and export
so if we are not careful if we are not thoughtful we
just because african agriculture is growing does not automatically
mean that african agriculture will actually lead to african prosperity
we already have an infrastructure that's built for exporting
resources anyone who has ever tried to fly
from dar es salaam to dakar senegal knows that you got to connect your
flights in paris
that is our transport infrastructure
you try and fly from the long way to abijah you'll find yourself
connecting flights somewhere in europe that is the
infrastructure we have right now so i'm not talking
talking theoretically that we could build a sector
that would extract and send out that is the infrastructure we already
have that's what we're set up for right now
we're not very well set up to feed each other across the continent we're
set up to send it all out so that's the first
set of decisions we as africans need to make
about what we want of our ag sector the second one
is do we want the growth of the african agricultural sector to actually be
an expansion of already existing systemic inequalities
within the agriculture sector do we want to how can we be careful
so that as the sector grows we're not actually growing inequality
and i mean i just love this graphic right like who's on the escalator and
who's taking the ladder up um
and it really starts getting us to the point that i really want to spend a lot
of time with us um
a lot of time with you on a lot of time on with you which is the
gender gap in african agriculture
now 62 percent of economically active women in africa
work in the agricultural sector and there are some
some of the numbers and i'm sure this slide deck will be available
can be shared um for you to to take closer look this is data from the
african development bank uh in rwanda malawi in burkina faso more
than 90 percent of the economically active women
are in the agriculture sector at the same time african women
while african women con constitute more than 60 percent of the labor
force in cocoa and coffee on average they earn less than one third
of the income that gets generated african women are putting in the labor
but are getting paid very little for that work we have a
system that is unequal from that gender perspective the
africa african rural wage gap between men and
women is estimated anywhere between 15 to 60 percent 60
wage gap i mean that's crazy you've got to be working
really hard to have a gender gap that big
um there's a report from the worldbankand1.org
that was funded by gates that said they found that when comparing
women and men with similar size plots in a similar context
the gender gaps in agricultural productivity ranged anywhere from 23
percent in tanzania to 66 percent in the share
same size plot same context and you're getting vastly different
um profits so we have a system that has a huge gender
gap as the sector grows what are we gonna do
to make sure that we're not taking a poisoned pie
and making it bigger but rather that we're fixing the systemic inequalities
so that even as the sector grows that growth
actually turns into a vehicle for building a more equal
society and i mean it's super basic there's no way you're gonna go with
economic growth if you're leaving 50 of your people
behind it's impossible right
so these are the things that keep me and my team up at night
um the piece of this puzzle and this fork in the road that we're trying to
to shape the decisions around is agricultural research and we're
really keen and convinced that you can accelerate
research impact by using a gender lens now let me kind of back into this a bit
first a lot of people talk about agricultural value chains
and often when we talk about agricultural value chains we tend to
think of value chains as beginning at the farm at that production level
but to be honest agricultural value chains actually start at the research
stage so if you're going to take a value chain approach and here i'm speaking to
some of my colleagues who are already in the ag sector
if you're going to take a value chain approach you actually need to be
considering the research end as the very beginning
of the agricult cultural value chain let me
translate that in really simple ways agricultural researchers make decisions
as part of their research process they make decisions that have
huge impacts further on down the line super quick down and dirty example
take crop breeding take a scientist who's working on a new
variety of beans
we have built systems to train scientists
to really focus on yield right you need to breed for something that's
going to have high heels along the way it becomes really
important for these same scientists to understand
and have the tools and the skills to be able to actually also consider
a whole host of other things for example you're coming up with a new variety of
bean how long is this thing going to take to cook
how much firewood and who's going to fetch that firewood to cook this thing
how much water is this thing going to take to cook
is it going to taste like crap i mean simple basic but if we have a
training system that doesn't equip scientists
with the ability to prioritize those questions
in addition to yield and mind you they're trying to it's not like
scientists are mean they're like we don't care about gender issues
they've got a whole host of things to consider water
climate change drought tolerance pest resistance a whole bunch of
really important things to also to think about but you can have the most water
efficient most pest resistant variety that nobody
cooks that nobody is buying and at the end of the day yeah it'll get
produced in the first season but if it didn't get bought the first
time if it's not getting consumed you've just invested millions into
a breeding program that's resulting in in nothing and so this is where
we as a ward work in this area where we're
working with scientists to help them understand what is the gender gap
and how using a gender lens to inform research decisions as i thought up the
value chain as we can possibly go has knock-on effects in terms of
efficiency and adapter adaptability of
their research outputs i was having a wonderful lunch conversations and we're
talking about the same composition when it comes to
soils right when it comes to nutrition how can we
help our scientists better understand and then know how to
prioritize what's really going to make a difference
in their in their research programs so real quick evidence indicates that
gender responsive research is more efficient results in more
inclusive better targeted and more relevant
innovations with higher rates of adoption
any of you who's interested in this topic especially around that
intersection between gender and and scientific research i
urge you to head over to the stanford website
stanford university has this program called gendered innovations where
they've been looking at the impacts of
what we lose when we ignore gender consideration in medicine
in engineering in environment we all know some of what's been happening in
terms of heart health and the ways we developed
hot medication that really does a good job
taking care of men's needs but is looking like it's not working as
well for us women fifty percent of the population who live
longer i must say so if i were a drug company i'd be like
customers for a lot longer anyway sorry i think i had too much coffee in the
little country okay at the end of the day when it comes
to agriculture we really don't want to be having our scientists come
up with version 2.0 of bicycles for fish we really need our ag scientists
coming up with innovations that are relevant
that are going to make sense that are actually going to get used because
no one goes into this the hard work of doing scientific research
only for it to sit on a shelf somewhere i've come to really know and appreciate
our scientists and know that they are dedicated and are spending their
lives on this because they really want to make a difference
and so my perspective and our perspective
at a word is how can we help them make that difference that they are so
dedicated to and how can uh instead of how can we
bring on board a set of tools that can help them do
that more so uh really quickly what then does the
word do is being that we are uh so concerned about issues of gender
responsive research uh i'm gonna plow through this excuse me
we've got a vision we've got a vision towards gender responsive
a gender responsive agricultural innovation system that's working towards
agriculture driven prosperity for africa our mission is investing in african
women scientists agricultural research institutions and
agribusinesses to deliver gender responsive ag research
we are looking at um how we work at the individual level and i'm not going to
read all of this because you can see it
around the room we are looking at how do we engage at
the level of individuals in building capable and confident
african women scientists who are able to lead innovations we are
looking at the institutional engagement how do
we engage agricultural research institutions both
national research institutions and universities so that they are able
to prioritize and embrace gender
responsiveness in both policy and in practice and then we're also
looking at the broader enabling environment
around how we can get gender responsiveness as a norm
that's embedded in the culture and practice of african
ag research so that third piece around their enabling environment is why
i'm here and how i locate my engaging with all of you virginia tech
is doing a lot with agricultural researchers on the african
continent and so if i can get our partners at virginia
tech asking their african colleagues and engaging
with african colleagues also around this issue of gender
responsiveness then we've got a holistic uh system and a holistic approach so you
guys are part of our uh broader enabling environment
okay what does a word do really quickly and i think
uh oh i've got a couple more minutes first the award fellowships and there
are flyers that are going around have gone around um
a number of you have have gotten some of those
um award was created first and foremost as a fellowship program and i'll talk a
bit about that we are doing that piece around
institutional transformation with uh grad and i'll talk a bit about that we
are doing a lot of training and capacity building
and we've also gone into thinking about gender and agribusiness
so that's kind of a quick overview of our programmatic activities
let me get into the first one which is looking at
where are the women and i've got some bad news
this is what's happening when it comes to
our ability to attract and retain women african women in agricultural
research on the continent we're starting off with women and 34 of
the students and by the time it gets to leadership
management you're looking at 17 so we have a the key pipeline when it
comes to women's leadership now does anyone know what the numbers
are in the u.s
i'm just going to leave that suspended in the room there for
hopefully someone gets interested in how the us is doing in recruiting retaining
and rising to leadership women in your own ag research sector
um okay
now part of me sorry i'm totally gonna be snarky and say
we're in africa taking care of our business how are you all doing
that's all enough with my snark um we partnered with uh if pre
international food policy research institute to recently go back and look
at the numbers again and found some really interesting
distinctions around the percent share of female researchers uh across
different countries um and again the the this deck will be
available for anyone who's interested what is standing out to us is actually
we look at the countries in the red francophone africa um is not doing as
as as well as there seems to be a gap and
is quite distinct between anglophone and francophone africa
and so the these finding findings are also
um informing the work that the ways that we as a world are moving forward and how
we are choosing to engage so again i'm gonna just keep keep
powering forward um so i talked about the fellowship and the
ways that the fellowship is our way of building up the pipeline of african
women scientists you've got the flyer so i'm not going to go into detail
around that um but i talked about engaging at the individual level that's
making sure we've got enough african women choosing to join the ag
research sector and staying and growing in their careers and we've
got the fellowship to work on that we recently added two new areas of
work one is institutions so we've got this
program gender responsive agricultural research
and development it's proving to be a bit of a
challenging acronym we think we're really good at acronyms but i think we
might have stumbled on this one so we're rethinking this the this this name
of the the name of this initiative but what
grad exists to do is to support african research
institutions grow in their ability to meet their mandates
that is to conduct research that is more inclusive
better targeted and better designed to respond to the
needs and priorities of a diversity of men and women
across agricultural value chains um and i think that i hopefully that speaks
to the the issues that i was talking about
why it's so important to consider gender in ag research
i've got my five minutes i'm pretty sure i can do it
um part of what we're looking at as we're looking at institutions
is within the institutional context the enabling environment at the system level
policies legislation in the political space that
institutions are working with if you're a director general or vice
chancellor of a universe a director general of a research
institution vice chancellor of a university
what's the political space that you're working within
to be able to devote more funding to gender responsive initiatives
right what is a cadet process for some for some of you in the room you know
what the kind of process is what does the kind of process say about gender
how can we better strengthen cadets so that it becomes easier for
our national institutions to align to to devote resources towards gender
responsiveness while by aligning to cardiff and vice
versa um and there's a whole host of other
global mandates the the agenda 2063 of the africa union and
all of these broader um policy policy
pan-african policy commitments or pan-african commitments
that our governments have made that if you're heading up a government
institution you can actually then articulate that the reason you're
leading your institution in this direction
is because you're helping the country meet its agenda 2063
targets or card up commitments at the organizational level we're supporting
leadership to understand how the internal processes arrangements
procedures frameworks and organizational culture
also shape what is possible and not possible and then at the individual
level we really need to focus on build focus
on building the skills of scientists so that they have the experience and
knowledge and and the technical skills to incorporate
gender considerations into their research processes
final piece of work that we have been doing is around
gender in agribusiness investments for africa
and part of what we're trying to do with and i think it's a great acronym
gaia i think we nailed it on that one um and what we're trying to do with gaia is
connect the dots from lab to farm to market
it does it's no good to have individual scientists and research institutions
produce gender responsive research if that research stays on the shelves
and doesn't find ways its way into the value chain
and so by working with agribusinesses and investors into agribusinesses to
help them understand why gender is important and
why they ought to be engaging with researchers from a gender perspective
also then makes sure that there is a pipeline
of innovations that hit the value chains that are
impacting the value chains with an aim to bridging the gender gap in african
agriculture that i started this conversation with so
what we're doing with gaia is create and manage an
ag tech solutions marketplace that ensures visibility commercialization
and scaling up of agricultural innovations with the potential
commitment to closing the gender gap in african agriculture
we've had a wonderful range of partners we've been piloting this work
um since late 2016 and throughout last year
we've had 430 applications from startup businesses from over 50 countries
79 businesses have been selected and some of the things that they have been
um that we have been supporting them with include the following
i just want to call out the intellectual property piece
so we have entered our partnership with the world intellectual property
organization to deliver intellectual property
training on intellectual property to both research scientists and
agri-business owners with the idea that a lot of scientists
distrust ip they think if you try and use any of
these ip tools what's going to end up happening is
you're going to restrict access to your research to anyone who can pay
and so it's been really wonderful working with ripo to help scientists
understand that not all ip tools
are about restricting and that you can use iptools
to actually open access to the innovations that you're working
on and so for example one of the ways that um also helps that
my husband's an ip lawyer so i got some of this by osmosis he's a
scientist who became an ip lawyer and when i started this job he was like oh
you guys are gonna have to talk about ip tech transfer how you get technologies
from the university and into the hands of businesses
no business is going to touch an innovation unless it's ip around it
because they want to know what they're buying
right and so having scientists be able to understand
should you patent first or publish becomes really important in building a
healthy innovation ecosystem for the continent
um i did it i think i did that was the one minute sign
um so thank you and again as i mentioned i
am happy to talk about a whole host of subjects and i think someone's taking
questions of people on webex too okay great
um so yeah that's what award does and i'm hoping that we have left us enough
time to really have conversation not just me talking at you
so i'm just going to say it's clear that
she's very capable of managing conversations so i'm going to sit down
and you can facilitate you know answer a discussion so i'm just
going to leave you with them what she's saying is you're on your own
all right how about me um can i walk around or is it really
important that i stay here for the mic
this thing that i turned off oh i can take this one oh good
okay what you guys want to talk about i'm so eager yes thank you
good afternoon my question is about brain drain
i noticed that you chose to go back to africa
so what do you think are the incentives african nations or even countries like
india china that have similar brain drain
experiences um what can i do to bring their talent
back home
oh that's a good one okay so it's a good one and it's a sensitive one
for a lot of people it's also sensitive for me and i'm gonna
give you probably that not the answer you expected
the kenyan government didn't do anything to attract me back home
right like i don't know i i'm guess i i'm not smart enough to
think about what governments can do to attract people back up
like i'm not smart enough to figure that piece out
what i do know is i think we keep having really
circular conversations about drain brain drain
that are based on very unfounded assumptions
one why is brain drain bad again again not the question you were
thinking not the way you were thinking i was going to answer
it why is brenda in so bad again first off do you realize do we
realize that immigrants send more money home
than overseas development assistance leaps and bounds more
and so yeah you could have a usaid but i was sending money home and that
assistance is targeted it's contextual it understands the needs on the ground
and it reaches communities a lot more directly
than having a big government contractor get a usaid
grant to build wealth somewhere right so
i'm not so down on on brain drain i'm also i lived in the us for 22 years
i went to high school here my husband in high school um
and the work that i was doing at kiwidata when the leadership incubator
that i founded as a grad student when i was a grad student and then when i was
faculty at usf did as much for girls and young women in
kenya as if i had physically been there but i
was able to leverage more resources through my networks
and the horizons that got opened to me because i was in the u.s and so
i think the question of brain drain is a lot more complex
and we keep trying to answer it as if globalization hasn't happened
and we're not connected and as if money flows
don't cross money money flows really respect
national boundaries today and we keep having a brain drain compensation
as if money and people only stayed one and brains
and innovations only stay in one place so i was
leading work in africa while in the us so controversial i know but
i told you i'm a lot shorter on opinions
yes so i was thinking about your slide and you talked about
pipeline from students to leadership in in agricultural research
it looks to me the the the choke point is
women going into
research careers right uh because the percentages were constant
across your first three categories from students to
essentially technical support
sorry i don't know what i did yeah so my question is can you generalize about
what what's causing that or or is it
something you you can't generalize about um
so here we go yeah
i don't know how to make it get bigger um
oh here we go
professional from professional technical support to
scientists professors lecturers well and then on to management what are the
factors that caused about how old are you when you're a graduate
and then professional technical support
with a graduate degree you're in your late 20s
yeah and that's when you're starting to make decisions about having family
about having children right so
i think that's where a lot of women end up getting stuck in that
technical support because you then need your master's degree
or your phd to cross into professors lecturers and and
research pis so then the composition that i have
with my african institutional leader colleagues
is how is your institution doing in terms of not making this a life or
death decision for a woman
in terms of her career because if you set up your incentive structures
within the organization that a woman has to decide either
i get married and make babies or i have a career
you've actually started shot yourself in the foot as an institution and you scale
that out to a whole continent you've got a
problem because you're having really smart people decide
to opt out or decide to hold back it's also why the award fellowship does not
have an age limit you could be 60 and apply and get in
because we recognize a lot of women opt out or lean back have their babies
do their family thing and then come back into their careers so
having a lot of these fellowships that have that age limit
i really disagree i mean so there's ways that we
build into our systems and our institutions
ways of saying to women we know you can we know you're smart enough
but we have decided you shall not and so how do we hara how are our
institutions telling women you shall not we don't
think you should and we're going to make it life or death
for you to decide whether you want to proceed this way and
i want to take that the next step forward which is also to
say gender relations in our societies are
changing not just in the us but globally
more women are entering the professional workforce and more women like me
are choosing to work and to pursue careers
i'm standing here with you my husband is in nairobi with our two children i have
a nine year old and a three year old guess what if he's working in an
institution that's gonna make it really difficult
for him to be the father that we both need him to be
that institution is going to miss out on him as well
and so the imperative it's not this is not about doing favors to women
with the way gender norms social roles are changing
this is not about doing favors to women it's about institutions that are going
to be able to squeeze every good last drop from their talent
pool and that means making it possible for both men
and women who want to be parents men who want to be active engaged
fathers and we had a generation of men who faced the decision and we set up
society systems that forced men to lean into the workforce
and lose connection to their children we now have a generation of men who are
saying i don't want to make that choice i want
to be an active engaged father and are our institutions set up and
ready to accommodate accommodate that generation of men and
for me that makes me excited about millennials
because i think they're gonna like you're gonna shake this [ __ ] up
it's fantastic i can't wait for you all to enter the
workforce because you're gonna make demands on our institutions
that haven't been made before and me and my husband's generations are the
kind of first vanguard in terms of it's not just
maternity leave it's patent it's family leave how do you manage that
so and i think an important point to make is a lot of the stuff when i stand
here and talk about gender a lot of people hear women this is not
about women and it's definitely not about men versus
women which is what a previous generation of
activists might have emphasized that's not what it's about it's about
how we all going to be healthy and how we're going to actually work
together to solve really pressing problems that previous
ways of thinking created including climate change
that me versus you that's how we got into this hot pickle
and it's getting warmer
thank you for coming and um
my question is you know as a woman i'm probably in between the 20 and 40
and like you my children have four boys and
i'm thinking of the extension poet extension
thriving community that we have here at virginia tech
and with the affiliations that you have i'm wondering if you've dealt or if you
can speak about girls or young ladies young women
driving who you know aids for for lack of a better
work the african community is grappling with issues such as you
know aids hiv or different diseases and we have
children now that are having to take up a mantle to do
something for the economy i'm not talking about specifically child
labor but just channeling in channeling the idea of
agriculture as a viable career field
for young women what have you talking about
so this is a bit outside the purview of what award does specifically being
that we're super focused on agricultural research and how to help
agricultural research do organizations do better what they what
what they want to do um but as i said i'm never short on
opinions so what i'm about to say is my opinion
um not awards official stands on on on the topic um i
i go to a lot of conferences where people talk about we need to make
agriculture sexy for the youth we need to make agriculture you know
what's super sexy making money that's sexy so what i want us to talk
about is how do we have have and build a viable agricultural ecosystem that's
not about drudgery but that's about you can
sustain yourself you can feed your family and you can
do all the things you aspire to do economically and and
as a whole human being based within this sector that's one
now that doesn't mean moving straight into the
kind of the political scientist in me is about to pop out
moving straight into the new liberal it's all about making money
this is all the because this is how we got into this climate change
mess in the first place using natural resources as if they were
you know non-ending infinite resources that we could just keep exploiting so
there needs to be a balance about and and i love the conversation about
sustainability which is more than making money it's
about sustaining a life and a livelihood but also sustaining the environment
within which we live now i'm going to say something
really and popular to my american colleagues it's
okay i'm one of you all but in important ways
america is working with systems that have ossified and it's
going to be much harder for americans to change your
thinking and your systems to adapt to the
changing environment and part of what excites me and part of
what drove me to move back home is we on the african continent are
working with new systems most of our universities are 20 years
old that means you can actually shape
policies we're working with wet concrete
whereas you guys here are going to need chisels and hammers
to actually break down some of the stuff the gender stereotypes the policies and
expectations and who does what that's already been
set up here whereas we on the african continent are
building from from scratch i'm sure that that i didn't
get into the hiv aids and girls but like i
i really want to keep it at the level of what kind of agriculture sector do we
want to build because it's not just about grow grow
grow it's what are we growing exactly
i'm looking at trying one more question okay i'm looking at time so
one i'm gonna take two but make them quick okay that's what i
was gonna ask you what are we doing sometimes i want to say thank you for
uh removing the agent and being worse that's one of the most responsive
um programming i think i've seen in terms of the
gender program so thank you for that in terms of water we grow
and it's a challenging question because those are handled us now releasing
organic food movements and then you're talking about
lab research and agriculture someone could easily argue that this is
promoting to that securely modified agriculture in the african continent
would you say oh this is a good one wow all right let me hear this one and then
my question was about the new the [ __ ] gap and i was gonna say you
said like it was very big like some countries it's 12 percent
others are 66 why is it so big and so broad and at the same time what
are what's going on to decrease it okay um let me start with this one and then
close with that the gm question um
it's country specific right like what happens in virginia is different from
what happens in hawaii so if you see a gap that's 12 percent
here and 66 in hawaii you really need to go
there to understand what's driving that and the answers are as very
varied as as the statistics and so i'm going to take that
opportunity to rail against some of what i see
happening which is we're going to use randomized control trials for bloody
every problem we're trying to understand this is where country-specific
studies in this specificity may helps you make sense of the numbers
um so sorry that's
a job somewhere i'm sure i'll get in trouble for it but i have to say
um another gm question so it's a question that my
uh our communications team hates me even touching but i love it because
they're like oh my god you're definitely going to say the wrong thing because
like we work with a bunch of scientists a lot of whom are working on gm
technologies i uh i'm an organic farmer i
a organic farm cooperative in san francisco
like a little in silicon valley a bunch of us were doing that
um so i guess and and i went to college in the process
pacific northwest
tree hunger completely um what has been interesting for me
personally and again this is not an award opinion
this is me personally what has been interesting for me is learning more
and being like huh some yes you can use conventional breeding to achieve some of
the pest resistance or water efficiency that we need um and there's something to
be said for being able to do it super quickly
now do i want pears that have fish dna i'm not sure about that do i
want african smallholder farmers to have access to
planting material that's going to help them have a decent habit
i'm interested in that what but even right but i'm not if i were oh [ __ ]
if i were minister for agriculture in kenya i'm not sure that i would have
found gm traps sorry guys because
the reason i wouldn't allow them is there hasn't been an
adequate african center conversation on what the heck this is what we want
and how we want to grow it and so i think the scientists have come up with
the technologies and they're galloping a hundred miles
ahead of the rest of us and i'm thinking because y'all are so smart
you can give us answers without actually asking us what we want
so if i were in a policy position i'd be like you need to go back and you
need to talk to people and this needs to be there needs to be
consensus within the society that the risks
outweigh the gains outweigh the risks that is me as a policymaker
from a politicized background as a scientist
i think we need as many africans actually getting training in these
technologies so that we have the human resource to be actually
able to have vigorous debate africans debating with africans not us
listening to western experts telling us this is what this thing can
do for you and other westerners telling us no you guys should
take this i need africans debating these issues in africa and the
only way we're going to be able to do that is if
we train enough of our people to understand what these things
are so they can bring that dividend to me and my mother and my grandmother
and then we talk about it and i need our policies set up to enable the
conversation to happen then we move forward if i had a magic
wand that's how i do it luckily for the
universe i don't thank you so much guys
i think you can see why we were so thrilled to get one giro here
our college of agriculture and life sciences we're also very interested in
the new partnership with award and so please one more time
join me in thanking
you