Dr. Alice Mweetwa

The Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) has picked Zambian scholar Alice Mweetwa, as the Deputy Executive Secretary responsible for Programme Development and Implementation.

The appointment was announced during the recent 17th RUFORUM board executive meeting held in Monrovia, Liberia from 24th to 25th April.

According to RUFORUM portal, Mweeta assumes office from 1 July and will be based at the RUFORUM secretariat hosted at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

She will join Florence Nakayiwa who is the second Deputy Executive Secretary responsible for Planning Resources Mobilisation and Management.

Previously, Mweeta served as Deputy Director for Research and Post Graduate Studies at the University of Zambia (UNZA), a position she has held since 2017, and was the immediate past Deputy Dean for Post Graduate Programmes of university’s School of Agricultural Sciences.

She has also served on several University boards and committees for quality assurance, policy formulation, income generation, Senate, journals publication, among others.  

Apart from mentoring and overseeing a number of peer-reviewed journals, Mweetwa is a Senior Lecturer of soil microbiology and general soil fertility in the Department of Soil Science at the UNZA.

She boasts knowledge in agricultural sciences acquired from “Miami of Ohio” where she studied her Master’s degree in Environmental Science and a doctoral degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, all of United States.

She has been rewarded as the 2017 Young African Researcher, 2016 National Science and Technology Merit Award, and the Norman E. Borlaug International Agricultural Science and Technology Fellowship Programme 2012.

She joins the staff at the secretariat from diverse countries of Ghana, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Benin, Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Uganda.

Photo courtesy of Ruforum portal

Story by Carolyne Nyokabi

The Article; https://blog.ruforum.org/2019/04/26/dr-alice-mweetwa-joins-ruforum-as-the-deputy-executive-secretary/