AWARD is a career-development program that equips top women agricultural scientists across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to accelerate agricultural gains by strengthening their science and leadership skills. AWARD Fellows, mainly from Anglophone Africa, benefit from a two-year fellowship focused on fostering mentoring partnerships, building science skills, and developing leadership capacity which are all conducted with a focus on gender issues in agricultural research.
Agropolis Fondation has been supporting the AWARD Programme since 2010, with 15 AWARD Fellows having spent their advanced science training in the foundation’s research units.
For its 2017 and 2018 Call for Candidates, AWARD would allocate, for the first time since its inception in 2008, 22 of the 44 Fellowship slots to candidates from francophone countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is made possible through joint effort of Agropolis Fondation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID. As member of AWARD Steering Committee, the Foundation played a key role in ensuring that French-speaking countries in SSA region are eligible to apply for AWARD Fellowships.