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About Me

Hello. My name is Thelma, a postgraduate student in the Masters in Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (MScCCAFS) program at the National University of Ireland, Galway and a recipient of the Irish Aid Fellowship. I got attracted to the MScCCAFS program because of its interdisciplinary nature and how it brings together a lot of cross cutting issues that are of interest to me.

I currently work as an Agricultural Officer in the Luanshya district of Zambia, where I work with over 15,000 smallholder farmers. My daily work involves offering advisory services and training to farmers on good agricultural practices and how to look at farming as a business and not only as a means of producing food for home consumption.

I received my undergraduate degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Zambia after which I interned with the Competitive African Cotton Initiative Project (COMPACI) under the German Development Cooperation (GIZ). One of my main duties there was to support the application process for micro-grants on behalf of women's groups. Most of these women could not read and write and were unaware of the many opportunities that are available to them. This steered in me the passion to work with women farmers to help them realize their potential in the agricultural sector because when women are helped to have access to various resources they can excel immensely and be able to feed not only their families but the whole community.

My other interests include natural resource management, food security, gender sensitive research, climate change and how best to help farmers manage various risks and uncertainty. For my undergraduate research, I looked at Farmers' willingness to pay for a hypothetical cotton insurance product as a means of cushioning shocks against the volatility of cotton prices.

For my MScCCAFS research I am looking at Covid-19 impacts on food system components in Zambia. The research will also involve mapping out of the potential vulnerable nodes in the Agri-food system. This is important as it can help the government, various value chain actors, NGOs and other stakeholders to know where to target interventions and be better able to manage similar risk and uncertainty in the future.