Dr. Margaret Kroma, ICRAF’s Assistant Director General for Partnerships and Impact, has been recognized as a featured agricultural role model by the Modernizing African Food System (MAFS) Consortium, an initiative that aims to help African agricultural education institutions develop the technical skills and institutional capacity required to modernize African food systems.

“Margaret Kroma provides one of Africa’s strongest voices on the importance of considering gender issues in African agriculture. In international fora, she offers consistently passionate, thoughtful insights about the gender dimensions of agricultural development,” said a post on the consortium’s website. “She backs up this passion with her tireless efforts in helping to expand professional opportunities for a more diverse set of actors in farming, research, education and extension.”

MAFS is a consortium of four major agricultural universities: Makerere University in Uganda, Michigan State University in the United States, Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Collaborative teams from the member institutions conduct research into the most effective ways to build the capacity of Africa’s agricultural education institutions.

As part of their work, the consortium maintains a list of “highly effective agricultural and agribusiness professionals” who can serve as role models for a younger generation of Africans. Kroma, who hails from Sierra Leone, was selected for the list based on a nomination and interview. She worked for the African Women Leaders in Agriculture and Development (AWARD) program and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) before coming to ICRAF. 

“My father and mother came from rural areas, so I spent school holidays with my grandmother in the Moyamba area of southern Sierra Leone,” Kroma said in her interview. “I saw how much time my grandmother spent producing food.  I became fascinated with agriculture as I began to wonder how it might be possible to reduce work requirements for people like my grandmother.”