New to the MAFAP team: Clara, Koutou and Nada
Three new colleagues have joined the Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme! They are Clara Picanyol, Mahamoudou Koutou and Nada A. Elberry. Let's find out a bit more about the latest team members to join MAFAP.
- Clara Picanyol, from Spain, joins MAFAP as an Economist.
She specializes in public financial management and has over 15 years’ experience advising governments and donors in more than 20 countries. She worked for several development partners (FAO, World Bank, UNICEF, GIZ, FCDO, UNFPA) mainly in the areas of costing and financing of social sectors. Clara is also an Associated Lecturer in the University of Barcelona teaching fundamentals of taxation.
She has worked extensively with the SUN Movement to track expenditures on nutrition, and more recently with FAO and the UN Hub for Food Systems on monitoring public spending in agrifood systems, as well as with the World Bank on nutrition-responsive budgeting.
Clara holds a BSc in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra with a special award for the top-10 best academic record in her year and an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In addition to her native Catalan and Spanish, she speaks English, Portuguese, German and some French.
With MAFAP, Clara will be supporting our policy monitoring and policy prioritization activities, especially on public expenditure data generation and analysis and potential methodological expansions onto nutrition and food security.
- Mahamoudou Koutou, PhD from Burkina Faso, joins MAFAP as a food and agricultural policy advisor.
Mahamoudou – our Koutou as he prefers to go by – obtained his PhD in Agricultural Economics from Abomey Calavi University (UAC) in Benin. He has also studied rural development engineering, sociology and rural economy at the Nazi Boni University (UNB) in Burkina Faso and a holds a multidisciplinary master’s degree in agricultural innovation and rural development from Joseph Ki-Zerbo University in Burkina Faso.
He has over 16 years of experience working in international development, having worked for different organizations, including the Institute of Research for Development (IRD), the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD), the Development on Livestock in Subhumid Zones (CIRDES), public universities, and FAO.
Koutou, as country focal point, will be coordinating MAFAP's policy monitoring, policy prioritization and policy reform portfolio in Burkina Faso.
- Nada A. Elberry, PhD, from Egypt, joins MAFAP as an Economist and is the newest member of the MAFAP team.
Nada is an Assistant Professor at the Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University. In 2022, Nada earned her PhD in public financial management from Ghent University, Belgium.
Her research focuses on public spending efficiency, budget credibility, fiscal openness and public debt management. Her research has been published in Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Economic Surveys, and Public Performance & Management Review.
Although Nada had been collaborating with MAFAP over the last few months to carry out a public expenditure review on food and agriculture for Egypt, she will now be supporting the team more broadly in this area, which is one of MAFAP's core work areas.