Ms Yodit Kebede is an independent researcher and international consultant in agroecology and food systems, who joined the NSPED team on 14 May 2025. A French national of Ethiopian origin, Ms Kebede holds a PhD in Landscape Ecology and an MSc in International Land and Water Management from Wageningen University (The Netherlands), as well as an MSc in Agricultural Engineering from VetAgroSup (France).
Early in her career, Ms Kebede worked as a Project and Communication Manager at the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU in the Netherlands, where she supported the coordination of a European project on agricultural innovations in dryland regions of Africa. She subsequently joined the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium as a researcher, contributing to projects on soil erosion control, remote sensing-based forest monitoring, and the production of land cover and land use maps.
Her doctoral research, conducted in Ethiopia, focused on ecological pest management of maize stemborers in smallholder farming systems, applying a landscape scale approach. During this time, she also taught and supervised MSc students at Wageningen University. Her PhD work resulted in four peer-reviewed, open-access publications. Toward the end of her doctorate, Ms Kebede first joined the NSPED team as a consultant, contributing her expertise on agroecology and ecosystem services. She later served as a postdoctoral researcher at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) in Montpellier.
Since 2022, she has worked independently as a consultant. Her recent assignments include advising WWF on integrating landscape approaches and agroecology; leading a five-country assessment of EU support to agroecology in Africa; supporting the Agroecology Fund in establishing regional funding mechanisms for Africa; and advising ECOWAS on the development of agroecology evaluation and monitoring tools.
Ms Kebede also contributed to academic discussions on agroecology's role in climate adaptation and mitigation. She is co-author of the 2021 report Agroecology and climate change rapid evidence review, which assessed the strength of evidence on agroecology’s contributions to climate mitigation and adaptation in low- and middle-income countries, as well as enabling conditions for scaling. Most recently, she co-authored a 2024 article published in Science highlighting the joint environmental and social benefits of diversified agriculture.
A list of her publications is available here.