Batamaka Somé to serve West Africa CoP as Regional Representative

The Collaborative Crop Research Program of The McKnight Foundation is pleased to welcome Batamaka Somé as Regional Representative for the West Africa region. Dr. Somé, a practicing anthropologist, is a research consultant based in Burkina Faso. He has conducted extensive research in agriculture and gender, mainly focusing on rural livelihoods strategies, food security, agricultural productivity and market access, and cash crop farming in Africa. He has also provided technical advising to nongovernmental, philanthropic, and humanitarian organizations, including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). At The BMGF, he worked within the Market Access team of the Agricultural Development Program, where he advised on sociocultural challenges related to integrating women into foundation-funded programs, as well as concerning farmers’ adoption of technologies. At WFP, he worked as Gender Advisor for an agriculture and food security project called the Purchase for Progress (P4P). In this project, he supervised implementation of the global gender strategy, designed and guided dozens of qualitative country assessments, and drafted country strategy projects and action plans. Dr. Somé’s research and reports have included successes and roadblocks for enabling women’s economic empowerment in agricultural value chains, economic impacts of poultry-raising on rural households, and the WFP West and Central Africa Bureau’s Regional Gender Strategy for 2015-2020. His current research focuses local governance of natural resources and climate change adaptation among pastoralists in Burkina Faso. Dr. Somé holds a BA in English, a Master’s degree in African literature, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Teaching Education from the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. He also holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology and a Master’s level Diploma in Gender Relations in International Development from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Dr. Somé will join Bettina Haussmann, Liaison Scientist, in the team’s support of the CCRP West Africa Community of Practice, which includes Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.