Participants
Emmy Simmons

Emmy Simmons
former Assistant Administrator, USAID
Board member, IITA & ILRI
Washington DC, USA

From 2002 - 2005, Emmy B. Simmons served as the Assistant Administrator for Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), capping a career with the Agency begun in 1977. As a Foreign Service Officer with USAID, she lived and worked in Africa for more than eight years and in Moscow, Russia for three years. USAID/Washington assignments included those of agricultural economist in the Program and Policy Coordination Bureau and Deputy Assistant Administrator in the Global Bureau’s Center for Economic Growth and Agriculture. Ms. Simmons also provided strategic leadership for USAID’s Africa Bureau as it took on the challenge of shaping the Development Fund for Africa (DFA).

Prior to her association with USAID, Ms. Simmons lectured and conducted rural research in northern Nigeria from 1969-1973. She collaborated with colleagues at Ahmadu Bello University’s Institute for Agricultural Research in authoring a book on “Farming Systems in the Nigerian Savanna,” published by Westview Press in 1982. Ms. Simmons also served as the Deputy Director for a national household expenditure survey while on the staff of the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs in Monrovia, Liberia from 1974 -1977.

Ms. Simmons was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines from 1962-64 before completing her M.S. in agricultural economics at Cornell University. She conducted her Master’s thesis research on the food economy of Mauritius in 1966 and received the Best Master’s Thesis award from the American Association of Agricultural Economics in 1968.

Today she serves on the Boards of two international research centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR): the International Livestock Research Institute headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture headquartered in Ibadan, Nigeria. She is also a member of the Science and Technology for Sustainability Roundtable at the National Academy of Sciences. She also serves on the Boards of the Society for International Development’s Washington chapter, the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa, and the George Washington University’s Africa Center for Health and Human Security. She is currently leading a policy dialogue project, “Reconsidering Food Aid,” which is being funded at the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa by the Hewlett Foundation.