Board Members and Staff

Hilary Corsun graduated in 2006 from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.  She earned B.S. degrees in Animal Science and Applied Economics and Management.  Hilary is particularly interested in the relationships between private enterprise, environmental conservation, and poverty alleviation.  As an intern at WOCAN, she will be focusing her efforts on fundraising, member services, and program development. 

Annie Benko is a Master's candidate in Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her focus is 'Gender, Environment and Development'. Annie received her B.Sc (Environmental Science) from the University of Guelph, majoring in Earth and Atmospheric Science with an emphasis in Development and Stewardship.  Her academic/research interests include women as agricultural producers and women's access to resources, particularly land and property rights, as well as political issues affecting women in Latin America. She is currently the Communications Intern with WOCAN.

Rosalud Jing de la Rosa was born and raised in Manila. Living in New York for 16 years, she worked with the United Nations system and received her Master’s Degree in Public Health at Columbia University. She currently resides in Rome where she works as a gender and rural development consultant for UN Rome-based agencies. For the past 22 years of her professional life, she has worked with a wide variety of international organizations on diverse development issues evolving around the agenda of the global summits of the UN. She has been in the forefront in advocating for women’s rights related to sustainable development, reproductive health and access to land and water, particularly in the Africa region. She is deeply involved in supporting participatory research, policy participation, coalition-building, and engaging diverse stakeholders to work together on the implementation of joint programs, having designed and coordinated several global collaborative programs with those aims. She is a member of the International Board of Directors of Environment Liaison Center International (ELCI/Kenya), the International Steering Committee on Global Governance of the World Civil Society Conference Follow-Up (Canada and Switzerland), and the Executive Council and Research Trainer of the Filipino Women’s Council (Italy).

Winston is a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago who has approximately forty years experience in development policy, programming and operations at national, regional and international levels. His key responsibilities and assignments over that period include managing local and national agricultural and integrated rural development projects; developing and directing a national agricultural planning system; advising on national and regional agricultural development policy; providing strategic leadership, guidance and management in three government ministries; building constituencies of interest across the public-private sector divide; negotiating with and undertaking international development-oriented assignments for multilateral institutions; serving as representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in South Asia and the Caribbean; reorienting FAO’s programmatic interventions to more fully accommodate gender and sustainability considerations; managing FAO’s post-tsunami agricultural, fisheries and related relief and recovery support activities in the Maldives. Winston’s interest is to remain active in development nationally and internationally, retaining a focus on people-related issues and challenges and ensuring that equity and social justice inform choices and responses. He has for many years, demonstrated his strong support of women who act as agents of change for gender equality.

Lorena is from San José, Costa Rica. Her efforts towards a sustainable and equitable human development include more than a decade of practical experience in public policy development and design and eight years in integrating social justice and gender perspectives into the use and conservation of natural resources. She is the author of more than 20 books and other publications on gender and environment, environmental health and public policies involving equity. Through her projects and initiatives a wide network of specialists providing technical assistance to more than 150 projects has been formed and more than 6,000 people have been trained using her methodologies. Lorena has extensive experience in UN negotiations on environmental as well as sustainable development issues.

From Ethiopia, Martha is a resource economist whose areas of expertise include gender and development, sustainable natural resource management, agriculture/ rural development, food security, HIV-AIDS, microfinance/credit, and advocacy. Over two decades, Martha has been playing an active role in international development at various levels- ranging from grassroots community development to national and international policy level dialogues. She has taken part in global development issues and policies, including the Millennium Development Project, the Convention to Combat Desertification, and the Beijing Conference on women. She also coordinated donors, NGOs and government agencies in integrating gender in the National Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper for Ethiopia, and successfully initiated and led several groups and organizations around gender issues in sustainable development, including the Group for the Advancement of women (GAW) in Ethiopia. Prior to joining Heifer, Martha was heading a Gender and Development Division of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Ethiopia. She successfully led the integration of gender in the undertakings of the Dutch Development Cooperation in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. Martha has served on several boards internationally, including Natural Resource Management Society, Sustainable Natural Resources Management Association of Ethiopia, and Association of Women Leaders in Agriculture and Environment in Ethiopia, Agricultural Economic Society of Ethiopia; and Eastern-African gender and leadership group. She has studied, lived and worked in diverse cultural and international settings, including Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America.

From Kenya, Alice holds degrees in agriculture and forestry extension and is an experienced designer of institutional capacity building, network coordinator and inter-agency collaboration facilitator. She has recently worked as a technical adviser in community participation to the Zambia Forestry College, and has many years of experience in participatory research, participatory project formulation, project proposal writing, monitoring and evaluation, project management, team facilitation, negotiation, and conflict management. She has acted as a mentor and trainer to women and men in research and project proposal writing and fund raising, training over 300 researchers from eastern, southern and western Africa on courses sponsored by African Forest Research Network/African Academy of Sciences, the International Foundation for Science, the International Union of Forest Research organizations and African Network for Agroforestry Education. Alice is a founding member of the Kenya Professional Association of Women in Agriculture and Environment, where she has contributed to the design and implementation of gender mentoring programs. Her focus is on poverty, community participation, and gender in relation to agriculture and forestry, and she has published numerous papers on these subjects.

A Filipina, Thelma has worked as a social scientist and gender advisor to the IRRI of the CGIAR for over 25 years, gaining a global reputation as one of the first women to advocate for the incorporation of gender within the CGIAR system. Thelma has published over 50 papers on gender and participatory approaches in rice based farming systems throughout Asia, with a focus on assessing strategy, policies and technology options for reducing gender inequity and improving livelihoods of low-income households. Thelma achieved international recognition for her 1994 work on methodologies for integrating gender into farming systems research; since then, she has been active in advocacy, action research/participatory research, training rural women and collaborative work with an interdisciplinary team of scientists to ensure that women are included in each stage of the research and technology development process. Thelma has played key roles in forming and building capacities of professional women’s groups, including the Women in Rice Farming Systems (WIRFS) Network; she developed the first “Leadership Course for Asian Women in Agriculture Research & Development,” and has mentored many young women interested in working on gender issues in agriculture. She has demonstrated unquestionable commitment and passion to help reduce poverty, empower poor women farmers, and promote gender equality in access to resources and information.

Senior Officer, Rural Livelihoods Strategies and Poverty Alleviation, Rural Institutions and Participation Services, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

Rome, Italy

Policy Advisor, Agriculture and Biotechnology, Economy Policies Division, Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)

Ottawa, Canada

Senior Officer, Rural Livelihood Strategies and Poverty Alleviation, Rural Institutions and Participation Service, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

Rome, Italy

Policy Advisor, Agriculture and Biotechnology, Economic Policies Division, Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)

Ottawa, Canada

Senior Officer, Gender and Development, Gender and Population Division (SDW) of FAO

Rome, Italy

ex-President of WEDO and Member of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons of the Secretary-General of the World Summit on Sustainable Development

Georgetown, Guyana