Monthly Archives: April 2016

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An inspirational advocate for gender equality in Africa

Category:Updates
Stella Williams

Stella Williams

AwF’s Woman of the Month award for April goes to Professor Stella Williams now retired from the Department of Agricultural Economics, Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) formerly known as the University of Ife in Nigeria. Stella is a truly outstanding scholar, activist and policy advisor on gender and Fisheries Economics in Nigeria. Women make highly significant but undervalued contributions to the fisheries and aquaculture sector nationally. However, their contributions are only slowly being recognized and still lags behind in rural and peri-urban communities all over Nigeria.

Stella Williams has been an advocate of gender and social equity perspectives in numerous development projects across Nigeria and the African continent. Early in her career, she concentrated her research efforts on value addition along supply chains in the fishing industry but later broadened her research scope to include the study of women in fisheries and aquaculture. In the last thirty-five years, her primary research and developmental work focused on investigating viable frameworks for user participation in fisheries and aquaculture management, fisheries governance through integration of stakeholders’ knowledge and enhancement of livelihoods and economic development of rural artisanal fisher-folks, in particular the women and children that are often left out in fisheries policy in Nigeria.

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