BOARD OF DIRECTORS
IITA-BIP BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Nkiru M. Okpareke
Nkiru is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Enviro Gro Farms – a company she co-founded to produce high-end vegetables for the Nigerian Market. It is a premier commercial grower and marketer of fine quality vegetables in Nigeria. Nkiru has over twenty years working experience with a decade of that experience in ExxonMobil as a project and design engineer and project manager for infrastructure projects in Nigeria, United States, Singapore and France. Nkiru has a B.Eng in Engineering from the University of Port-Harcourt and an MBA from the Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada. In 2015, she won an award from The Centre For Value Leadership (CVL) as an Outstanding Female Entrepreneur in the Agricultural Sector. She is also a Fellow of the Cochran Program of the United States Department of Agriculture and a fellow of the United State department of States International Visitors Leadership Program (IVLP) under the African Women Entrepreneurship Program (AWEP).
Nkiru currently provides research support for the production of consistent insect frass and insect meal in line with global standards to Protein Kapital Ltd on the various projects they are working on.
She is the board chair of IITA, Business Incubation Platform (BIP) and also the board chair of Agridrive Nigeria and Kenya where she is in charge of strategic management of the board.
Adebowale Akande
Debo Akande is a Director with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, with close to 20 years of International Development Management experience. He is the CEO of the IITA-CGIAR Business Incubation Limited and Programme Lead, Mechanization. He was the former Head of Olusegun Obasanjo Station in Democratic Republic of Congo, the third-largest IITA Research for Development station in Africa. He leads IITA Agribusiness management globally with a specific focus on public policy, new business development and private sector engagement in agribusiness for economic development.
Bernard Vanlauwe
Bernard Vanlauwe is the Deputy Director General for Research for Development at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). He joined IITA in Kenya in 2012 to lead the Central Africa hub and the Natural Resource Management research area. He obtained his PhD in 1996 in Applied Biological Sciences from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium and has published over 200 papers in scientific journals and (co-) supervised over 40 PhD students. He is also currently leading the Excellence in Agronomy Initiative of the CGIAR. His main research has focused on the development and scaling of Integrated Soil Fertility Management options for smallholder farmers in key farming systems of sub-Saharan Africa.
Kenton Dashiell
Kenton Dashiell is the Deputy Director General for Partnerships for Delivery. Dr Dashiell received degrees from Purdue University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Florida in Agronomy and Crop Breeding.
He was the Soybean Breeder for IITA based in Ibadan, Nigeria, from 1983 to 2001. While at IITA, he worked with several partners in the national agricultural research systems and other IITA scientists to develop soybean varieties with promiscuous nodulation, high grain and fodder yields, good resistance to pod shattering and several diseases. Some of these varieties were tested and released in several African countries and are now grown by smallholder farmers. He was the Leader of the Grain Legume Improvement Program at IITA for many years and managed soybean and cowpea projects in several African countries. Before leaving IITA in 2001, he was the Director of the Crop Improvement Division.
Before joining IITA in 2012, he was the Leader of the N2Africa Project based with CIAT-Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility in Nairobi, Kenya. This project is working with partners in eight African countries to increase grain legumes’ productivity and nitrogen fixation. He was the Location Coordinator and Research Leader for the North Central Agricultural Research Laboratory at the USDA-ARS in Brookings, South Dakota, for six years and the groundnut breeder at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater for three years.
At present his biggest interests include moving technologies that increase crop yields in farmers’ fields and improving the health and nutrition of African families from the labs and research fields to the end users, and building the capacity of the next generation of agricultural scientists, technicians, extension agents, and farmers. He is always looking for new partners for IITA in the areas of agriculture, food, nutrition, and health.
Hilde Koper-Limbourg
Hilde Koper-Limbourg is the Deputy Director General, Corporate Services of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). Hilde is from the Netherlands and obtained a BSc in Tropical Agriculture from the International Agricultural College, Deventer, The Netherlands, in 1987 and an MSc in Human Resource Development from the University of Stirling, Scotland, in 2000.
She started work in the tropics for the West African Dwarf Goat Project, a research project of the University of Wageningen at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. After that she worked for the Netherlands Government in a Livestock Development Project in Mongu, Zambia, and for FAO in the Caribbean Amblyomma Programme, based in St. Kitts and Barbados. After her MSc she worked as a project officer for the Lancashire – Gulu Link in the UK, a community-based charity that exists to promote mutually beneficial links between the people of Lancashire (UK) and Gulu (Northern Uganda), before coming back to Nigeria.
Back in Nigeria in 2006, she started working as a short-term consultant in IITA and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) projects in livestock production. Between 2008 and 2016 she worked for the ‘Contract and Grants/ Project Administration’ IITA team, from starting as a consultant, to leading the team from 2011. She was hired in her current position as DDG-CS from October 2016.
Oluyemisi Iranloye
Oluyemisi Iranloye is an indigene of Ogbomosho in Oyo State, Nigeria. She obtained a B.Tech degree in Biochemistry from the Federal University of Technology, Minna in 1997 and M.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University Ibadan in 2000.
She is a graduate of Stanford Seed Transformation Programme, Stanford University, California, USA, a programme which gives her the opportunity to mentor one intern from Stanford University from year 2015 to date.
She was a member of the Governing Council of Oyo State College of Agriculture, Igboora in 2019 and currently a member of Board of Directors of IITA-Business Incubation Platform (IITA-BIP) amongst other Board appointments.
She has attended several management training courses in Nigeria and abroad, including the Nigerian SME Equity Investment Trade and Development in 2005, at El Camino College, Torrence, California USA.
Oluyemisi Iranloye is an intelligent and a visionary leader whose driving force is love for humanity.
She joined EKHA AGRO Farms Limited in 2002 as a Senior Manager, Projects and was made the pioneering Executive Director of EKHA Agro Processing Limited (the first company in West Africa and second in Africa to produce glucose syrup from cassava) in 2004.
Oluyemisi Iranloye, a born quintessential Biochemist/entrepreneur, is the first female Cassava Starch industrialist in Nigeria and West Africa; she runs an inclusive business model where smallholder farmers are at the centre stage of her business. She is a philanthropist with a large heart for helping the poor and downtrodden.
Akinbayo Atere
Akinbayo Atere has over a decade of banking experience covering banking operations, retail, commercial, and corporate banking with Nigeria’s oldest and one of its biggest banks. He founded Arterius Capital & Advisory Limited, to offer risk consulting and financial advisory and other services to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to scale Cashvance.ng to offer financial inclusion services to SMEs and individuals. He is also an investor in budding fintech and technology companies.
