Participants
John Lynam

John Lynam
Managing Director
Kilimo Trust
Nairobi, Kenya

John Lynam has for the last year been the Managing Director of the Kilimo Trust, a grant making institution supporting agricultural development in East Africa. Prior to that, he was an Associate Director in the Food Security Program of the Rockefeller Foundation, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He served in that capacity for sixteen years and over that time was involved in a number of programs developing capacities in national, regional, and international agricultural research systems operating in East and Southern Africa. Most recently he managed a program on Enhanced Soil Productivity in East and Southern Africa. He holds a PhD in agricultural economics from the former Food Research Institute at Stanford University. From there he joined the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Cali, Colombia, where he worked for eleven years as economist in the Cassava Program, particularly focusing on the integration of social science into biological research programs. He is most recently co-author with Felix Nweke and Dunstan Spencer of The Cassava Transformation: Africa's Best-Kept Secret and co-editor with Cyrus Ndiritu and Adiel Mbabu of Transformation of Agricultural Research Systems in Africa: Lessons from Kenya.