Dr. Moses Osiru is a Senior Education Specialist at the World Bank. He holds a Ph.D. in Agriculture (Plant Pathology) and a Masters in Plant Breeding/ Pathology. Dr. Osiru has over 20 years of experience in the education and agriculture sectors, including close to ten years within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) as Regional Plant Pathologist in Southern Africa and West and Central Africa. In that role, Moses supported farmers to enhance production and marketing with focus on development and use of research technologies. For example, he supported farmers at the National Smallholder Farmers Association of Malawi to meet standards needed to export groundnuts to the European Union and led the development of ECOWAS’s Strategy and Action Plan for the Control of aflatoxins in West and Central Africa.
Moses was the first Manager of the Regional Coordination Unit of the Regional Scholarship and Innovation Fund of the Partnership for skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology based at icipe (International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology), Nairobi, Kenya, whose aim is to double the number of African PhDs trained. Prior to that, Dr. Osiru was Deputy Executive Secretary at the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture, (RUFORUM), a network of 163 universities across 40 African countries whose mission is to strengthen the capacities of universities to foster innovations responsive to the demands of smallholder farmers and further key stakeholders. At the Ministry of Agriculture in Uganda, Moses facilitated the review and reform of agricultural research in Uganda leading to the new Uganda Agricultural Research Policy, 2004.