Sara Mbago-Bhunu and Lucía Rivera Lima

Sara Mbago-Bhunu

Sara Mbago-Bhunu is the Director of IFAD’s East and Southern Africa Division.

Mbago-Bhunu brings to IFAD rich work experience spanning more than 20 years in the agriculture sector across Central, East and Southern Africa. She has worked on agriculture policy and sector reviews, value chain development, access to agricultural finance, social enterprise models and the promotion of small and medium-sized enterprises in peri-urban and rural areas. She has also led and managed teams in other development organizations in the design of development projects and capacity-building programmes.

Prior to joining IFAD, Mbago-Bhunu worked at the World Bank as a Senior Agricultural Economist for the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Congo, based in Kinshasa. From 2013 to 2016, she served as Country Director for SNV-Netherlands Development Organisation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mbago-Bhunu holds a Masters in Business Administration from Maastricht School of Management, Netherlands, and a BSc in Agricultural Economics from the University of Reading, United Kingdom.

Lucía Rivera Lima

Lucía has worked with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO). She has also worked with the Indigenous Terra Madre network of Slow Food International and is now an Advisory Board member of the Slow Food Coffee Coalition.

Lucía is a Guatemalan anthropologist and sociologist and holds a master’s degree in Development Studies from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has focused her career on socio-economic dimensions of the rural and agricultural world, specifically on indigenous peoples' rights, gender inequalities and the interrelated challenges of child labour and youth employment. She firmly believes in making sustainable agri-food value chains more inclusive and in taking in consideration interculturality, intersectionality and participatory approaches.In her free time, Lucía writes for "Le Grand Continent" about social challenges in Guatemala and Latin America.