Suresh Babu

Suresh Babu is a Senior Research Fellow in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit and is the Head of IFPRI’s program on Learning and Capacity Strengthening. His research includes human and organizational strengthening of food policy systems, policy processes, and agricultural extension in developing countries. Over the past 23 years at IFPRI, Dr. Babu has been involved in institutional and human capacity strengthening for higher education and research in many countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, including, Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa. He coordinated IFPRI’s Central Asia program South Asia Initiative and was also the program coordinator for the Agricultural Open Curriculum and Learning Initiative (AGROCURI), a consortium of 40 partners from CGIAR centers, universities in developing and developed countries, and international organizations.

Before joining IFPRI in 1992 as a Research Fellow, Dr. Babu was a Research Economist at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. He later spent 5 years in Malawi working as a Senior Food Policy Advisor to the Malawi Ministry of Agriculture on developing a national-level Food and Nutrition Information System; an Evaluation Economist for UNICEF-Malawi working on designing food and nutrition intervention programs; and Coordinator of UNICEF/IFPRI food security program in Malawi. He was also a Senior Lecturer at the University of Malawi, where he helped initiate post-graduate programs by developing and teaching computer-based policy-oriented courses.

Dr. Babu has published more than 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and authored or edited 14 books and research monographs. He was a coordinating author of the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment. He has been an honorary visiting professor at the Indira Gandhi National Open University of India, a guest professor at the China Center for Rural Development, Zhizhang University, China, and an honorary professor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal University, South Africa. He is currently on the editorial board of four peer-reviewed journals and serves on several international advisory committees including the Advisory Board of the World Agricultural Forum. In 2019, Dr. Babu was selected as the co-editor of the African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (AfJARE). He earned both his master’s degree and PhD in Economics from Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa.