Mr. Joshua Sikhu Okonya
Program Officer for Technology and Innovation
Mr. Joshua Sikhu Okonya is the Program Officer for Technology and Innovation at ASARECA. Under this role, Mr. Okonya facilitates regional collaboration in the development, dissemination, and promotion of priority agricultural Technologies Innovations and Management Practices (TIMPs) across 15 ASARECA member countries. Mr. Okonya also coordinates activities of two ASARECA-led multi-stakeholder platforms (The ASARECA Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance and the ASARECA Private Sector Forum). He holds a Master of Science degree in Tropical and International Agriculture with specialization in Crop Agronomy, Agrobiodiversity and Entomology from the Georg-August University, Goettingen (Germany). He also holds a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Zoology and minor in Botany and Chemistry from Makerere University, Uganda. He was trained in Insect Ecology at ICIPE (Kenya); Pest Risk Analysis at Fera Science (UK); International Development Cooperation; Climate-Smart Agriculture; Intercultural communication at DAAD (Germany); Safeguarding, IT, and Modelling at CIP (Peru); Proposal and Research Writing at Author AID (UK); and Computer Applications at Makerere University (Uganda). Mr. Okonya has over 15 years’ experience in implementation of agricultural research for development projects in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Netherlands and Germany. He joined ASARECA from the International Potato Center (CIP). Prior to this, he served as a consultant at ACP-EU Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), Wageningen (Netherlands) in 2016.