Vanya Slavchevska is an economist, specializing in gender issues in agriculture in developing countries. She joined CIAT in Vietnam in 2018. Her current research centers on gender and social inclusion issues in agriculture with a particular focus on cassava value chains in South East Asia and Latin America. She also leads research on migration and its effects on agriculture and rural communities.
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 including World Development, the Journal of Development Studies, Agricultural Economics and the Journal of Comparative Economics. Vanya holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics from the American University in Washington, D.C