Vanya Slavchevska is a gender and social inclusion scientist within the Crops for Nutrition and Health Lever of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and a gender focal point for the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers, and Bananas.

She has over 8 years of experience working on gender in agriculture. Her current work focuses on gender and youth issues in cassava value chains in South East Asia and Latin America to inform inclusive and equitable technology development and scaling. Her research interests also include rural transformation and migration impacts on labour dynamics and women’s empowerment in agriculture and rural communities, as well as the application of big data and other information technologies for gender research.

Before joining CIAT, Vanya spent two and half years with FAO’s Social Policies and Rural Institutions division in Rome, where she worked on issues related to gender and land rights, rural transformation, migration and women’s empowerment in agriculture. Prior to that, she worked for the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab where she supported gender-informed impact evaluations and co-authored a report on “The Cost of the Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda”. Vanya has substantial field experience in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia; her research has been published in high regarded peer-reviewed journals.

Vanya joined the Alliance’s office in Vietnam in 2018; she is currently based in Cali, Colombia.