Professors Cynthia Caron and Denise Humphreys Bebbington will travel to the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia (CIAT) to attend a Root, Tubers, and Bananas (RTB) Group University Partnership Gender Integration meeting. The meeting is part of the RTB Group Universities Linkage Program, which aims to support collaborative research between U.S. and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research’s (CGIAR) Research Program scientists by concentrating on university faculty and their students.

The program has been organized for the express purpose of linking faculty and students with RTB Group research projects to conduct gender analysis. The RTB Group’s multi-faceted gender strategy intends to improve food security and reduce poverty while strengthening gender equality. For this to happen, all farmers, both men and women, must be able to benefit from science and technology interventions leading to positive development outcomes. As such, collaborations across partners with different, but complementary strengths, must drive a focused food security research and extension agenda.

The program will be held on October 14 – 15 and will bring faculty from Clark University, Cornell University, University of Florida, University of Illinois (Chicago) and the University of San Francisco, California together with CIAT scholars to discuss synergies between individual university programs and the current CIAT research agenda.

Professors Caron and Bebbington both actively participate in IDCE’s Land, Food, and Natural Resource Governance Signature and the Women and Gender Studies Program.