Rosemary Vargas-Lundius

Rosemary Vargas-Lundius: holds a Ph.D. in development economics from Lund University, Sweden and has carried out research on rural poverty and unemployment, gender and migration. From 1989 to 2015 she worked at different UN Agencies, including UNDP in Guatemala, Vietnam and New York. She joined IFAD in 1996 where she worked as a Country Program Manager in the Latin America and the Caribbean division, Policy Coordinator and more recently as Senior Researcher at the Strategy and Knowledge Department. Since her arrival at IFAD, she initiated a comprehensive Gender Mainstreaming Program in LAC which later was replicated in other regions, as well as a Financing Facility for Remittances (FFR) which later became the multi-donor FFR of IFAD. She also initiated a program to promote decent employment for rural youth and mainstream youth in IFAD’s work. More recently, she took the initiative of developing a new Gender and Youth webpage to share IFAD’s knowledge on these important topics. Dr Vargas-Lundius work put lots of emphasis on building up collaborations with other UN agencies, development partners and academic institutions (WB, OECD, ILO, UN/DESA, ODI, IIEP, Sussex University, to name a few). She is presently the Chair of the KNOMAD Cross Cutting Theme on Gender as well as the Co-Chair of the Thematic Working Group on internal migration and urbanisation.

Her main publications include:

• Peasants in distress – Poverty and unemployment, Westview Press (1989)
• IFAD’s approach to gender mainstreaming, IFAD (2000)
• Polishing the Stone- A journey through the promotion of gender equality in development projects, IFAD (2007)
• International migration, remittances and rural development, IFAD (2008)
• From summit resolutions to farmers’ fields: Climate change, food security and smallholder agriculture, IFAD (2010)
• Gender dimensions of agricultural and rural employment: Differentiated pathways out of poverty: Status, trends and gaps, FAO/IFAD/ILO (2010)
• Feeding future generations: Young rural people today – prosperous, productive farmers tomorrow, IFAD (2011)
• Sustainable smallholder agriculture: Feeding the world, protecting the planet, IFAD (2012)
• Rural youth, migration and development (forthcoming)