Ramni Jamnadass

Ramni H. Jamnadass is a Kenyan driven to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and other poor communities through applied agroforestry research. She has great passion in building capacities of national institutes with a special focus on empowering women.

Her leadership and commitment to advanced use of genetic resources beyond conservation has led to successful public-private partnerships for both upstream research and downstream applications related to agrifoods.

One of her key achievements include establishing, in partnership with Mars Inc., the African Orphan Crops Consortium Next Generation Sequencing (AOCC-NGS) state-of-the-art laboratory to generate sequence information to use in marker-assisted breeding of neglected African crops. She also led a 10-year program in collaboration with Unilever to domesticate and develop a new tree crop Allanblackia spp for Africa, which has made it to European markets.