Agriculture and Horticulture

Biography

Victor Afari-Sefa, a citizen of Ghana, is an Agricultural Economist and the Global Theme Leader - Consumption at AVRDC - The World Vegetable Center. He is based at AVRDC’s Regional Office for East and Southern Africa in Arusha, Tanzania. He has extensive experience in performance monitoring and impact assessment of horticultural value chains on smallholder livelihoods. In this present position, Victor leads and coordinates vegetable socioeconomic research in sub-Saharan Africa and globally by assessing opportunities and challenges in production systems, analyzing constraints in the value chain, and analyzing policy in interdisciplinary context. He has multi-country project management experience and coordinates multidisciplinary research in horticultural value chains, in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia where he emphasizes on proactive planning processes to attain set deliverables. He also has international experience in integrated economic-biophysical optimization modeling of agricultural water use. Prior to joining AVRDC in 2010, Victor worked as a Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Specialist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and Research Scientist at Center for Development Research (ZEF) in Bonn, Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany as has 25 peer reviewed publications to his credit.

Research Interest

Monitoring and evaluation, ex-ante and ex-post impact assessment studies of horticultural crops, rural farming systems and livelihoods, socio-economics of vegetables for food and nutrition security, consumer studies on domestic and regional horticultural markets, , economic cost analysis of postharvest losses in horticultural crops and agricultural water use and management.