Amanda Sue Grossi

Amanda Grossi, whose last name means “well-fed” or “likes to eat” in Italian, was born on World Food Day, loves food, and is relentlessly determined to make making sure everyone gets enough of it. A research team leader for Climate Action and Resilient Food Systems at the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, her work centers around advancing food and nutrition security in Africa, and strengthening education systems towards this end.
Amanda’s passion and focus have always been on the rural communities who initially sparked her interest in locally led development during her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal’s Peanut Basin. Since then, she has worked on a wide array of projects and initiatives in various research, business development, and communications capacities—with organizations such as the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), the Earth Institute Agriculture and Food Security Center, the Clinton Foundation, Plan International, BYkids, Building Tomorrow, Trees for the Future, Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture (CNFA), and the Columbia Climate School’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).
Amanda is most excited by the transformative power of education and ardently believes that supporting farmers to become climate-resilient means also supporting the network of actors who surround them. Towards this end, she works with universities, agricultural extension systems, policymakers, and farmers themselves co-develop skills-based curricula to take advantage of best-available information for climate risk management. A systems thinker at heart, she is eager to see the long-term impacts that such collaborative capacity development initiatives will make upon the lives and livelihoods within Africa’s food systems.