Her face lights up when she talks about home.
“Whenever I go home, the primary school I went to calls me and I talk to the children. There is one person who once told me, ‘Oh, you went to America?’ They could not believe that one could do agriculture and fly on a plane!”
Of course she is excited about home. She left home to change home, and there was a need to.
Dr Jane Ininda, the head of seed research and systems development at AGRA, is proud of her career milestones, and the impact she has had on society. She has traveled the world, hovering her magic wand over every single ground she has stepped foot on, and leaving an indelible memory.
“Early on, I bred wheat- and then maize. One of the hybrids I developed is being grown across the region, with a production of 1,000 metric tonnes. I developed about 33 hybrids grown by 15 seed companies,” she says. The motivation came from her humble beginnings.
Born and brought up in Mbeere, Embu County, Dr Ininda was constantly disturbed at the low yields her parents got in spite of labouring hard on the farm.
“It was very dry- and we lived in a situation where the rainfall was inconsistent- you only harvested a crop two of five seasons. My parents struggled to feed us. And I wondered why we had to buy food all the time.”
A school-feeding program saw her through school. In spite of these problems, she had never considered pursuing a career in agriculture until, later on in high school, a university don spoke to the students and outlined new career paths that were viable for girls who excelled in sciences, like Dr Ininda.
“Up to that point, I had thought the only course I could pursue, with my ability in sciences, was medicine,” she says. While she did her Bachelor of Science in Agriculture at The University of Nairobi without incident, she nearly fumbled her Master’s.
Dr Ininda was doing her plant breeding research and was collecting data when she delivered her baby. One of her professors was livid.
“I had lost a season. My professor said it was unacceptable and I had to either start again or drop the course. The other professor said ‘No, you do not have to throw away the data because you missed one season, one location. You can catch up. Next season, do more environments.’”
Many odds are stacked against women, she says, and ultimately, they have to work harder, through a myriad of problems, to sometimes be at par with their male counterparts. Their biological clocks keep ticking, placing them in precarious situations where they have to balance a number of things, none of which they can drop.
“Women have to balance family and career, family and research, family and science.”
They also have to beat cultural stereotypes, she says, and it thus becomes harder to boost their numbers in STEM (Science, technology, engineering and mathematics), which is already a tough field in its own right.
A gracious, unassuming professional who, for this interview, is donning a multicoloured, flowing dress and a resplendent black coat, Dr Ininda preaches the gospel of science- and mainly agricultural innovation- with fire in her belly.
“It is proven that if agricultural productivity is increasing, a country’s GDP also increases,” she says. “A lot of people do not understand agriculture, however, and that is why the young girls need a lot of sensitization early enough so they may understand that it is not all labour- it is not about digging on the farm all day. It is about science and technology.”
She challenges women scientists to come to the fore and to make deliberate effort to pull up other women into adoption of crucial scientific innovations that are of benefit to them and to the continent. Only women, she says, can take the lead to reach out to their fellow women.
“In Africa, 75 percent of all food production is done by women. They select the seed, they work on the farm- and they respond more to women scientists.”
For a plant breeder, she, without a doubt, understands the impact women have on agriculture. “In this research, we do farmer preference. And we are doing this for women- they know what their families want. The women researchers understand it better. Most varieties bred by women researchers are more accepted.”
Dr Ininda is afraid that little money is allocated by governments to research, and even that faces stiff competition between men and women- who are outnumbered already- further disadvantaging women. Research is very expensive, she says, and only deliberate funding- through affirmative action- will help women get there. In the end, Africa should not be importing food it has labour- and land- that can produce.
She is proud of what she- and many other scientists- have achieved so far.
“For us who were born in the village, we used to see our mothers harvest one bag of maize, or beans- or even half a bag of maize- on one acre of land and now they can get up to ten bags of maize. Evidence of improved yields is there for countries where science is active in terms of supporting scientific innovations,” she beams.