For unapologetically underpinning her transformative policies and approaches with scientific and technical expertise and her long-sighted vision that puts her work on the front line of Africa’s resilience to climate change.

Agnes’ deft understanding of linkages between climate, food insecurity and the science of agriculture, and her ability to communicate them to virtually any person, has made a vast contribution to Africa’s agricultural transformation, helping to lift more than a million Rwandans out of poverty, scaling impacts for millions more African farmers and establishing lines of defence against the threats of climate change for some the most vulnerable regions in the world.

She never holds herself less than personally accountable and this affects everything from how she interacts with her closest team to her belief that farmers—consistently at the core of her organization’s science-based policies and interventions—are families to whose success she is tirelessly dedicated. 

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Agnes Kalibata is a Rwandan agricultural scientist and policymaker, and president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). 

Joyce Msuya is the Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Follow UNEP at the United Nations Climate Action Summit here.

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