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With research staff from more than 70 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

researcher spotlight
Lily Bliznashka is a Research Fellow in the Nutrition, Diets, and Health Unit. Her research focuses on assessing the effectiveness of multi-input nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific interventions and the mechanisms through which they work to improve maternal and child health and nutrition globally. She has worked in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda.

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Since 1975, IFPRI’s research has been informing policies and development programs to improve food security, nutrition, and livelihoods around the world.

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IFPRI currently has more than 480 employees working in over 70 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

Penina Muoki is a Program Manager in the HarvestPlus section of the Innovation Policy and Scaling Unit with over 20 years of work experience in nutrition-sensitive agriculture projects that apply a market-led value chain approach. Since 2019, she has been working for HarvestPlus managing projects that promote biofortified high iron beans and pro-vitamin A maize and orange sweet potato in Kenya and Tanzania. She has delivered agricultural and nutrition projects through commercial pathways and school feeding program pathways, as well as a social model aiming to improve infant and maternal nutrition, working through synergistic public and private partnerships.
Before joining HarvestPlus, Penina worked with the Ministry of Agriculture-Kenya, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture-Mozambique and Malawi, and the International Potato Center-Kenya. She holds a master’s degree in Food Science and Post-harvest Technology from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Kenya, and a PhD in Food Science from the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Twenty years of HarvestPlus programs have a lasting impact.