Lead Consultant Africa
Hilde is an industrial engineer, qualified in biotechnology, with a focus on tropical agriculture. She has a lifetime of experience working with smallholder farmer groups and rural communities to implement certification programmes and develop supply chains from the ground up. She has been implementing sustainable agriculture and aquaculture programmes in the tropics since 2003 and is used to working in some of the world’s most volatile areas, such as Virunga Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her expertise lies in:
- assisting small scale farmer groups to improve production and to achieve Organic, UTZ, Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance certification by ensuring they meet labour, environmental and sustainable farming standards.
- developing conservation programmes and using dynamic agro-forestry systems combined with food production to protect ecological hotspots. She has worked with the Congo Basin Forest Fund (CBFF) during the Preparatory stage of the REDD project in the Virunga National Park/Mount Hoyo region.
- conducting market analyses and feasibility studies under the auspices of the International Trade Centre (ITC) and UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), to evaluate the competitiveness and challenges of SMEs in the agro-food industry in Africa in the face of climate change.
- providing training to executive members of commercial organisations and farmer associations in cocoa supply chains, focusing on participative development of traceability systems to ensure sustainable production.
- developing sustainable fisheries, implementing social and environmental standards in the small scale fishing sector.
Hilde is based in Kampala, Uganda, and is fluent in Flemish, French and English.