Victor MANYONG A MANYONG Ph.D

Dr Manyong is an Emeritus Director at IITA and Consultant Economist to the BBEST project. He provides technical assistance in areas of economics and agribusiness in the participating project countries (DRC, Ghana, Mali and Niger). More specifically, he provides support to the development of the business model; he leads the development of policy briefs on the project; he supports the project manager in policy dialogue with authorities, especially in DRC; he provides guidance and support to socioeconomic studies, especially those on Work Package 1 of the project and its publications.

Formerly, he was the Director for Eastern Africa Hub at IITA based in Tanzania and leading a team of about 40 international recruited scientists after working for many years at IITA Nigeria focusing on West and Central Africa. He was also the leader of the Social Science and Agribusiness Research Group of the institute. On that capacity, he led a group of IITA scientists during the design and fund raising for the BBEST project. He holds a BSc degree in agriculture from DRC, an MSc and PhD in agricultural economics from Belgium.

His research and development experience has been on the economics of food crops in sub-Saharan Africa, market and impact studies, policy studies, and analysis of production economics. He has published extensively more than 300 articles in referred journals, books, book chapters, policy briefs, etc. He has also contributed to capacity building with supervision of more than 20 post-graduate students at MSc and PhD levels and many undergraduate students. He organized several sessions on group training of national professionals and farmers in the National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS).

He attended international conferences, meetings and symposium in many countries in Africa, Europe, Japan, North and South America, and South Asia. Before joining IITA in research, he worked in the private sector, both profit and non-profit in agriculture and in extension services of the Ministry of agriculture in DRC. He is fluent in both French and English, and Kiswahili (in addition to other national Congolese languages).