Tata Ngome Precillia Ijang (Ph.D,)

Tata Ngome Precillia Ijang (Ing. Agronome, DESS, MSc, PhD)

Socio-Economist, Senior Research Officer (Maitre de Recherche)

Institute of Agricultural Research for Development (IRAD), Cameroon

Lead – Intensification and Diversification Research Program, IRAD 

Sub-Director incharge of Communication and Documentation, IRAD

CocoaSoils Baseline Survey Coordinator for Cameroon

Precillia Tata is a very smart person with an excellent and a multidisciplinary academic background. She has a PhD in Environmental Science from Rhodes University, South Africa from 2013 – 2015. During her PhD studies, she benefitted from the 2014 round of the McNamara Fellowship program.  During 2007-2008, she studied and obtained an MSc in Governance and Development in Sub-Sahara Africa in Antwerp University, Belgium through the VLIR scholarship program. Before, she studied in the University of Yaoundé II, Cameroon from 2001-2002 obtaining a Post graduate diploma in Economic Policy Management – this was a Worldbank sponsored program through the Africa Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) program. With brilliant performance from high school, she was privileged to enter the prestigious Faculty of Agronomy and Agricultural Sciences of the University of Dschang, Cameroon from 1993-1999 where she obtained the ‘Diplôme D’Ingénieur Agronome’ (Post Graduate Diploma in Agronomy and Agricultural Sciences, specialized in Economics and Rural Sociology).

With over 18 years of work experience, Precillia is a social scientist presently interested in Socio-Economics research with focus on 1) Politics of Agriculture and Natural Resources; 2) Food Security and Nutrition Sciences 3) Marketing and value chain analysis and 4) Governance and development. In the field of forestry, her work has focused on Non Timber Forest Products (NTFPs), natural resource management, fuelwood, forest, people and livelihoods, food security and nutrition, multi-stakeholder processes and forest policy and governance. In agriculture, she worked on value chain analysis, marketing, seed system analysis, farmers-graziers conflict, farming systems and cropping systems etc. She has also carried out and led baseline surveys and evaluation studies.

Although since 2002, she has been working for the Institute of Agricultural Research for Development (IRAD) in Cameroon, before and in between, she has served as a consultant for organisations such as CRS, AVRDC, IUCN, COMIFAC, The World, CIFOR, FAO, IITA, STCP etc. Presently, she has 20 published papers, two book chapters, one book and more than 30 project completion, consultancy and workshop reports. In 2016, she was appointed a Sub-Director in charge of the Communication and Documentation Unit of IRAD. Here, she manages the website, IT, telephone, library and internet facilities of the institution. She has dynamized this unit and has put in place an institutional newsletter called IRADnews which is presently on its 30th edition.