Background

Dr. Sylvester N. Ayambila is a Development Economist with special interest in micro and small enterprise development, gender studies, effects/impacts studies of development interventions, farm production and value chains. He is currently a Senior Lecturer and the Head of the Department of Applied Economics in the School of Economics, University for Development Studies. He is also the Applied Research Coordinator of the West African Centre for Water, Irrigation and Sustainable Agriculture (WACWISA). He has undertaken many research and collaborations for many organisations and programmes which include; CIAT, IUCN, ACDEP, IWMI, FAO, IFDC, USAID, AGRA, WFP and the EU Horizon 2020. Dr. Ayambila interest in gender issues deepened when he was fortunate to be a rapporteur for the high-level UN-Women Expert Group Meeting in Accra in 2011 under the “Enabling Rural Women’s Economic Empowerment: Institutions, opportunities and participation”. This great exposure inspired him to include gender as part of his PhD thesis to investigate the female-underperformance hypothesis as espoused in literature. He has since been involved in projects that sought to increase female participation in the use of solar powered irrigation systems and the use of simple water lifting equipment for the welfare of rural women across communities in Northern Ghana.