Babra Akello Adiama is a MasterCard Foundation alum from Uganda. She is an agriculturist who is into livestock farming and is currently working in the humanitarian sector. She is also a Jim Leech MasterCard Foundation Entrepreneurship fellow, an academy of women entrepreneurship fellow and a mentor. She is passionate about mentoring and empowering fellow young people to be at the forefront of providing bold solutions to societal challenges. Her interests or her hashtags as she calls them, are in sustainable agriculture, technology, climate change, entrepreneurship, youth, and gender. She is an aspiring global food security and climate change specialist who likes to spend her leisure time reading books, articles, singing and dancing.
She is currently working as a livestock officer with Mercy Corps Uganda. Her work involves spending time with agriculturalists, agro-pastoralists, and pastoralist households to improve knowledge, skills, and adoption of modern livestock practices. Practices that are climate-smart, nutrition-sensitive and support resilience of communities. Through her work, she develops and designs strategies for livestock market systems development, business cases and conducts research and monitoring of livestock market actors. She has been able to positively influence her community and share the knowledge she has in agriculture. She is a mentor to farmers and youths involved in agriculture to commercialize livestock value chains, to improve on-farm and off-farm livelihood opportunities in the livestock sector.
What challenges are you facing at work?
I work in a traditionally male-dominated sector (I am not a huge person as well). Sometimes I receive inappropriate comments from people who doubt my competence to work. Whenever I introduce myself, I have had people doubting my capabilities for instance asking if I could restrain or inject a cow.
What is the best way to deal with challenges and what advice would you give someone facing challenges at work?
How I have dealt with this is by being myself, perfecting myself, and being confident. Challenges are part of life, and they help us grow, always take them positively, use them to your advantage and make sure you thrive through them.
What is your favourite quote?
“Everything you want is on the other side of fear – Jack Canfield”
Comment on the AL for Agribusiness
The average age of a farmer in the world is sixty. The network is changing the narrative by cultivating young people to contribute to their country’s economic development and food security. I would like to contribute to the network by; mentoring young people to drive change in the agriculture sector, participating in discussions, sharing ideas and, intentional networking for the growth of the network and all its members.
