CGIAR February 9 2026

 Visible role models are key to crushing stereotypes and biases, and closing the gender gap in science. For IDWGS 2026, CGIAR celebrates the voices and achievements of women whose work, leadership, and lived experience will inspire the next generation of scientists.

Graduate Fellow Juliet Masiga won the ILRI CapDev Grand Challenge 2025 for her presentation showcasing groundbreaking research on improving vaccine quality control for livestock.

What motivates this early-career scientist? “Translating what we do in the lab into something that the common person, the farmer back home can understand, apply to their daily life and improve the health of their animals. This leads to better economies, more money for the farmer and overall, a better life for everyone.”

For Masiga, scientific work isn’t destined purely for publication in journals and Petri dishes in the laboratory – it needs to be accessible and deliver practical impact in the field. 

At IITA, Africa Food Prize Laureate Mercy Diebiru‑Ojo is helping advance a new approach to rapid crop multiplication with Semi‑Autotrophic Hydroponics (SAH), taking SAH from scientific innovation to practical, scalable system for farmers and seed producers across sub‑Saharan Africa.

The method speeds up the generation of clean, healthy planting materials, allowing improved cassava and yam varieties to reach communities more quickly and reliably. “It’s a way of producing planting materials that is very different from the traditional way, which involves a lot of drudgery,” she explains.

SAH is also accessible: “This does not involve serious laborious work,” she notes. “Women and youth can do it very conveniently.”

The newly-launched CGIAR Hub in Abu Dhabi has a number of promising products in the pipeline, including Agri LLM. “Before, farmers had to use ChatGPT to get incorrect or imprecise information,” explains Lina Yassin, Data Product Director, CGIAR Digital Transformation Accelerator. “Soon they will be able to ask questions to Agri LLM, a large language model that speaks agricultural language simplified to the farmer’s language.” They’ll receive a customized response based on CGIAR’s extensive, robust, cutting-edge agricultural research.

See: https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/cgiar-marks-international-day-women-and-girls-science