FAO welcomes new officer to Samoa
The FAO Subregional Office of the Pacific Islands is pleased to welcome Mr Joseph Nyemah Nyemah as Nutrition and Food Systems Officer.
A Liberian-Canadian national, Joseph arrives directly from Malawi where he was with the One UN as humanitarian advisor. “In this role, I led inter-cluster coordination for the food security, agriculture, nutrition, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), education, protection and health clusters over a $395 million humanitarian response. Working for the One UN did not only help me to see humanitarian and development work from a broader and integrated vantage point; it also strengthened my partnership building capacity across different UN and government agencies, NGOs, etc…” Joseph explained.
In his new role as Nutrition and Food Systems Officer for FAO, Joseph hopes to contribute to the work of his colleagues in FAO and across other UN agencies, governments, national and regional NGO and civil society partners to improve resilience in agriculture, nutrition and food security.
“I want for us to collaboratively study the contextual applicability of a food systems approach – the analysis of food from the handling of the seeds to the point of disposal – and how the generated knowledge can inform programming”, Joseph says.
Joseph is a former food security cluster coordinator with FAO in Mali, West Africa, where he coordinated two IPC – Integrated Phase Classification analyses for food and nutrition security.
He also worked in HQ in Rome with the World Food Program as an integrated context analyst in VAM (Vulnerability Analysis Mapping), where he led the publication of “Tracking the Development of Urban Food Security Assessment Tools: 2010 to 2015”
While working for the Paris-based Action Contre La Faim, he managed integrated agriculture and food processing, aquaculture, nutrition and socioeconomic analyses in Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, the Somali Region of Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sri Lanka from 1996 to 2005.
From 2008 to 2014, Joseph worked in the Canadian public service across community, rural and economic development His last post was director of regional planning, government of Nova Scotia, where he developed Nova Scotia’s first ever social enterprise strategy.
Joseph has published in several peer-reviewed academic journals, for example, the Australian Journal for Studies in Continuing Education, and Canadian Social Studies Journal.
Joseph has a multi-disciplinary academic background that straddles rural sociology/development, development economics, political science and adult education. Joseph’s research interest looks at the politics and interconnectedness of gender, culture, migration, and capacity building. He is a research fellow with the European-North American “Borders in Globalization (BIG)” project and the Delmore “Buddy” Daye Afrocentric Learning Institute, Halifax.
Joseph is joined in Samoa with his family including his wife, four year old son, two year old daughter, and his sister.