The very first lessons in inequality that Dr. Eileen Nchanji acquired were neither from policy papers nor project logframes, but rather from observing how power silently influences daily life. With a background in anthropology, she grew attuned at an early age to the social factors that dictate who gets a hearing, who decides, and who reaps the benefits. That perspective became more focused in Cameroon’s cassava fields, where she worked with women farmers whose livelihoods were threatened by climate change, yet who had little influence over agricultural decision-making. This was her first step into international before development and research.

Instead of prescribing solutions, she decided to take on the role of a listener and made sure the solutions came from the voices of the people and their lived experiences. Prioritizing women’s preferences, labor realities, and risk considerations became the focal point of her work, and one that later would direct her interactions throughout Africa. Her professional path led her from grassroots communities to institutional spaces, including the German development agency GIZ, where she navigated the sensitive intersections of gender, tradition, and reproductive health. These experiences solidified her belief that in agriculture, the technical issues cannot be separated from social structures.

Currently, she is the Gender and Social Inclusion Expert at the Alliance of Bioversity Internation and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, working through the Pan Africa Bean Research Aliance across 31 countries in Africa, connecting research, policy, and practice. The work she does ensures that gender evidence is translated into systemic change and, consequently, that women, youth, and marginalized groups are recognized not as recipients but as the forces behind resilient and inclusive agricultural futures.

From Theory to Lived Reality

Dr Nchanji’s path to gender expertise took shape through her university anthropology training, where she developed a critical awareness of broader societal inequalities. This academic foundation found its testing ground in Cameroon’s cassava fields, where she worked with women farmers navigating the impacts of climate stress. Rather than imposing external solutions, she centred on women’s own knowledge and preferences to inform breeding priorities, an approach that would become her signature methodology.

Her work with the German Development Agency (GIZ) brought different challenges. While working with teenage mothers on reproductive health and harmful traditional practices, she directly confronted deeply entrenched gender and religious norms. These experiences revealed how power, gender, class, education, and social networks intersect to shape access to resources, ultimately inspiring her doctoral research on gendered access to land, water, and seeds.

“I learned that you cannot separate technical issues from social realities. When women lack access to quality seeds, that’s not just an agricultural challenge; it points to deeper power imbalances in households, markets, and institutions,” she explains.

The Architecture of Change

In her current role, Dr Nchanji employs what she calls the “reach, benefit, empower, and transform” framework. This approach moves systematically from ensuring women can access resources to fundamentally transforming the systems that have historically excluded them.

At the community level, she positions women, youth, and socially disadvantaged groups not as beneficiaries but as knowledge holders. Through participatory research, co-design workshops, and continuous feedback loops, she ensures that interventions reflect real constraints around time, mobility, resources, norms, and power. These insights translate into practical tools and guides such as the Youth and Women Quality Centre (YWQC), Gender responsive seed index, G+ tools for gender-responsive breeding, Women’s Climate Change Resilience Index, Gender Responsive Nutrition Guide, gender-responsive-breeding, gender-responsive training, tailored extension approaches, and locally relevant innovations that communities can adopt and adapt.

Critically, she is working with both women and men to collectively address norms. “Sustainable change depends on shared understanding and negotiated solutions that benefit everyone, men and women individually, households, communities, and the nation at large,” she emphasizes. This approach recognizes that excluding men from gender conversations often breeds resistance rather than transformation.

At the institutional level, she bridges research and practice by translating complex gender evidence into actionable guidance for policymakers, small and medium enterprises, and development partners. She integrates gender indicators into monitoring systems, supports the development of gender strategies and policies, and builds internal capacity among colleagues and partners. Crucially, she frames gender inclusion as both an equity imperative and a performance driver, linking it to resilience, productivity, income, food security, empowerment and accountability.

Strategies That Work

When asked about shifting gender norms in traditionally patriarchal agricultural environments, Dr Nchanji becomes animated. Her strategies are people-centered, relational, and embedded in everyday formal and informal systems rather than delivered as standalone “gender activities.”

She begins by creating spaces where women, youth, and marginalized groups articulate constraints and solutions in their own terms, thereby building legitimacy and ownership. Working with men, particularly husbands and leaders, as allies accelerates change. Facilitated dialogues and education help men understand how rigid gender norms limit household productivity, resilience, and well-being, creating space for shared decision-making rather than resistance.

“We show the value of gender equality by linking it to tangible livelihood and business benefits. Improved yields, income stability, supply reliability, and climate resilience; these outcomes speak louder than abstract principles,” she notes.

She builds capacity and creates safe spaces for women leaders and youth champions to shift perceptions of who can lead and innovate. By embedding change into institutions where gender becomes central to operations, she moves gender transformation from awareness to everyday practice, rooted in dignity, trust, and shared progress.

Impact on the Ground

Nchanji takes pride in her work on gender-transformative socio-technical innovation bundles in Kenya and Ethiopia. Instead of promoting technologies alone, this approach integrates improved seeds, agronomic practices, market linkages, and institutional support to actively address gender norms, decision-making, and inclusion.

The results proved measurable and visible. Women farmers gained improved access to quality seed, extension services, and climate-responsive practices aligned with their preferences, labor constraints, and risk profiles. Through participatory learning and household-level engagement, women’s roles shifted from unpaid labor to recognized decision-makers in production and marketing. Women reported increased confidence, stronger voices in household decisions, and greater control over income derived from crop sales.

Youth benefited from clearer entry points into seed production, aggregation, and service provision, moving beyond casual labor into more skilled and entrepreneurial roles. At the community and institutional levels, the work challenged entrenched norms by engaging men, extension agents, and local leaders as part of the change process.

Small and medium enterprises and development partners adopted more inclusive delivery models, such as training schedules, demonstration plots, and input packages, community dialogues, gender responsive nutrition trainings, finance and markets, thereby improving adoption and performance. The bundled approach strengthened trust, productivity, and resilience, demonstrating that gender transformative innovation not only advances equity but also improves agricultural outcomes and system sustainability.

Navigating Resistance

Implementing gender-responsive policies brings consistent obstacles rooted in institutional inertia, entrenched social norms, and misaligned incentives. She faces resistance from leadership that perceives gender as a compliance burden rather than a performance driver, limited gender disaggregated evidence-based data to guide decisions, and cultural norms that constrain women’s mobility, voice, and access to assets. In rural contexts, time poverty and unpaid care work further reduces a woman’s ability to participate meaningfully.

She navigates these barriers by adopting a human-centered, systems-oriented approach. She engages leaders with early evidence of linking gender inclusion to productivity, risk reduction, and market resilience. She works with both men and women to surface concerns and co-design solutions. By embedding gender actions into existing business processes and institutional systems rather than treating them as add-ons, she reduces resistance, builds ownership, and enables sustained, gender-transformative change.

The Power of Stories

Two fieldwork experiences have profoundly shaped Dr Nchanji’s perspective. Working with the Ushirikiano Women Self-Help Group in Nakuru, Kenya, exposed her to the everyday contradictions’ women navigate. The group’s solidarity, collective savings, and peer learning during COVID demonstrated how women create power even within restrictive systems. This experience reinforced her belief that gender transformation must address both resources and relationships, and that collective action provides a critical pathway to empowerment.

In Burundi, working with Christella Ndayishimiye, CEO of Totahara Limited, offered her a different but equally powerful lesson. As the head of a composite flour company, Christella navigated male-dominated businesses and policy spaces while building an inclusive enterprise. Her leadership showed how women can reshape value chains from the top, influencing sourcing, employment, and product innovation. Seeing Christella translate resilience into institutional change affirmed Dr Nchanji’s commitment to working across scales from grassroots groups to women led SMEs to ensure gender equality embeds itself not only in communities but also in markets and decision-making spaces.

Vision for the Future

Dr Nchanji’s long-term vision centers on African agricultural and development systems where women, youth, and socially marginalized people confidently lead, make decisions, and shape the future. She believes agriculture thrives when everyone’s knowledge, effort, and voice receive valuation. This means creating systems where women have secure access to land, finance, technology, and markets, and where institutions SMEs, research bodies, and governments embed gender equality and equity into everyday practice, not projects.

From a policy perspective, she identifies urgent reforms such as secure land and resource rights, gender-responsive finance with de-risking instruments and alternative collateral, institutional reforms that build women’s leadership pipelines, care economy policies that reduce time burdens, and robust data systems that use gender disaggregated data and power indicators.

Her message to young African women aspiring to leadership resonates with hard-won wisdom: “Your lived experience is not a weakness; it is your strength. The questions you ask, the injustices you notice, and the solutions you imagine are shaped by where you come from, and that perspective matters deeply.”

She encourages them to seek knowledge boldly, build technical skills while investing in relationships and integrity, face resistance with consistency, find mentors while becoming one, and stay rooted in purpose. “When your work improves lives on the ground, leadership becomes not a title, but a responsibility and a legacy,” she concludes.