Victor Afari-Sefa, a citizen of Ghana, is an Agricultural Economist and a research for development practitioner, with over 18 years of post-graduation experience in projects and programmes design, implementation management, feasibility and impact assessment and resource allocation. He was appointed the Regional Director of the World Vegetable Center (WorldVeg)’s newly created West and Central Africa - Coastal and Humid Regions based in Cotonou, Benin in April 2017. From 2011 to 2016, he was the Center’s Global Theme Leader for its defunct Consumption R&D Theme that comprised of produce postharvest, marketing, nutrition and monitoring and evaluation of R&D interventions. He has extensive experience in performance monitoring and impact assessment of horticultural value chains on smallholder livelihoods. Victor previously led and coordinated vegetable socioeconomic research in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia by assessing opportunities and challenges in production systems, analyzing constraints in the value chain and policy in interdisciplinary context, where he emphasized on proactive planning processes to attain set deliverables. Victor currently leads the horticulture priority intervention area and vegetable value chain component of the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) initiative funded by the African Development Bank. Victor understands and promotes public-private partnerships as one mechanism to introduce, test and validate horticultural innovations to enhance household resilient production systems, market efficiencies, landscape management, institutional and inclusive policy reforms and impact investments.
He also has international experience in integrated economic-biophysical optimization modeling of agricultural water use at river basin level. Prior to joining the World Vegetable Center in 2010, Victor worked as a Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Specialist for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Ghana, where he implemented the M&E framework of the closed Sustainable Tree Crops Program in 5 West and Central African cocoa producing countries. He is a successful author and co-author of several grant proposals and has published a number of books / book chapters and 56 peer reviewed articles in international scholarly journals. Victor transitioned into his research career position from an academic background where he taught and researched diverse courses in agricultural and economic development as well as agribusiness development thinking and practice. He remains connected to academia as an MSc. and PhD co-supervisor of student projects in a number of Universities in Europe and Africa. Victor holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany.