Authors

Claudia Witkowski is an Advisor in the GIZ Green Innovation Centres for the Agriculture and Food Sector project in Zambia where she focuses on the development and impact evaluation of agricultural value chains.

Matthias Berthold is an advisor in the GIZ Sector Project Rural Development where he focuses on Food Loss & Waste and Water & Agriculture. Before his position in the sector project he worked in Egypt in the context of irrigated agriculture and cooperation with the private sector.

Dr. Johanes Agbahey is agricultural economist. As advisor at the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) GmbH, he is actively engaged in the development and management of projects based on requests from partner countries. His work contributes to improve agricultural policies and enhance intra-African trade.

Florent Kossivi Tiassou is a Togolese-born journalist, trainer and consultant based in Bonn, Germany, who produces programmes and environment-related reports for "Deutsche Welle".As a trainer, he is specialised in the dissemination of best practice examples on climate change adaptation and sustainable land management (SLM) and was awarded with the Carl von Carlowitz Sustainability Award 2019/2020 by the "Senate of the Economy".

Maria Schmidt studied Political Science, focussing on development cooperation and policy analysis in sub-Saharan Africa early in her Franco-German studies at the Sciences Po Bordeaux Institute and University of Stuttgart. This led her first to the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation, then to the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Benin and, most recently, to the GIZ in Ghana. She has been working there for the ComCashew project since December 2015, and, within her advisory duties, is primarily involved with public partners in promoting the cashew value chain.