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Olivia B

Mar 12, 2025

7

min read

Women's History Month 2025: Five Women Who Shaped Our Food Systems

For Women’s History Month, we’d like to honor five women who changed the world through food systems, agriculture, and innovation.

Women's History Month 2025: Five Women Who Shaped Our Food Systems

Dr. Maria Andrade shows off her biofortified sweet potatoes.


As we celebrate pioneering women across all industries and fields this Women’s History Month, we would like to acknowledge those who helped create the agricultural world as we know it. From Victorian citizen scientists spearheading ecology from their gardens to modern lawmakers directing government food policy, women have shaped our understanding of sustainability, agricultural science, and conservation throughout history. Here are five of the many whose hard work and knowledge suffuse our food systems to this day. 


Harriet Williams Russell Strong (1844-1926): The Walnut Queen of Whittier

Harriet Strong’s story was laced with adversity from the start. When her husband died by suicide following a chain of failed business ventures, 39-year-old Strong was left with four daughters to support, a mountain of debt, ongoing spinal issues, and a ranch in Whittier, California now threatened by foreclosure. Strong was not one to be cowed by the situation, however, and she quickly set about educating herself on soil, agriculture, irrigation, and business. She decided to plant walnuts, a highly profitable but incredibly thirsty crop. To satiate their water needs, she took advantage of the area’s regular flash flooding to create a novel system of water collection and control structures. Her 1887 patent for dam and reservoir construction featured a series of ascending dams constructed so that when the lower basin filled, water pressure supported the dam above it, acting as both a reserve of water and a reinforcement. 


These inventions allowed her water-hungry walnuts to flourish. Within five years, her walnut farm became the largest in California, and subsequent patents earned her two prizes at the Chicago World’s Fair. Soon her ventures took her to the realms of government and activism, where she spearheaded the Los Angeles Flood Control Act of 1915, served in public office before she even had the right to vote, and attended the US Chamber of Commerce convention as its first female delegate. Alongside Susan B. Anthony, she travelled across the country promoting women’s causes. After her death, the government used her work to build the Hoover Dam and the All-American Canal, which she had urged lawmakers to construct throughout her life. 


Today, Strong’s work has rightly led to her induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame. As her daughter Hattie put it, “She had the brains to think up a way out and the courage and perseverance to carry her ideas to completion.” 


Sources & Further Reading 


Dr. Mary Engle Pennington (1872-1952): The Ice Woman

Refrigeration is a cornerstone of our food system. Ensuring that transportation maintains an adequate “cold chain” of perishables is critical to our health and the availability of countless foods, such as dairy, meat, and fish. We have Mary Pennington to thank for the abundance of these staples on our shelves. 


Gender barriers in college did not dissuade Pennington from pursuing a robust education. Although she completed the requirements for a BS in Chemistry with minors in zoology and botany, the University of Pennsylvania did not grant degrees to women at the time and instead gave her a certificate of proficiency in 1892. Three years later, when Penn began offering degrees to women, she returned to earn a PhD.  


Pennington joined the US Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry, which would later become the Food and Drug Administration, in 1905. Following the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, she became the FDA’s first female lab chief and turned her attention to developing safety protocols for preventing contamination in chicken and milk processing. An engineer as well as a scientist, Pennington investigated refrigeration cars across the US, created standards for their construction, patented multiple food safety inventions, and later helped design commercial and consumer refrigerators.  


Pennington’s work was applauded by her peers both during her life and after. Herbert Hoover awarded her the Notable Service Medal in 1919; the American Chemical Society, of which she was a member, granted her the Garvan-Olin Medal for her achievements as a female scientist; in 1941, the New Yorker celebrated and profiled her as the “Ice Woman” of refrigeration; and she received numerous prestigious fellowships throughout her career. Posthumously, she was the first woman inducted into the Poultry Historical Society Hall of Fame, and she now also resides in the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Hall of Fame, the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame. 


Sources & Further Reading 


Alice Catherine Evans (1881-1975): The Pasteurization Champion

Alice Evans is best known for her research on bacterial contamination in raw milk, and her work was critical to normalizing pasteurization and codifying procedures that keep us safe today. She received a BS in bacteriology from Cornell in 1909 and an MS from the University of Wisconsin in 1910, becoming the first woman to receive a bacteriology scholarship from the college. Instead of pursuing a PhD, she joined the Dairy Division of the Bureau of Animal Husbandry at the USDA and turned her attention to brucellosis, an infection that causes sudden miscarriages in animals. Though it was thought to pose a risk to humans, the disease was not well understood. 


Evans connected brucellosis to a human condition called undulant fever, identified the bacterium causing the painful condition, and hypothesized that it could be passed from cows to humans by consumption of raw milk. When she published her findings in 1917, her work was met with a fierce wave of criticism. The idea that a female scientist, lacking a PhD, had discovered something that her decorated male peers had overlooked, was unthinkable. Her findings, however, were verified a few years later, and Evans was vindicated. 


Evans was elected president of the Society of American Bacteriologists in 1927 but could not attend her own inauguration because she was suffering from brucellosis herself, which she’d contracted during her research. Despite her illness, she continued to advocate for pasteurization of milk and study other bacteria like streptococcus. Even after her official retirement, she continued working in the field, and she became a popular speaker, lecturing on women’s education, business, and scientific careers. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Her discovery is now considered one of the most important public health contributions of the 20th century. 


Sources & Further Reading 


Dr. Evangelina Villegas (1924-2017): The Maize Maestra

The world would be a hungrier place without Evangelina Villegas’ innovative work on corn and her development of Quality Protein Maize (QPM). Educated at the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, she began working for Mexico’s National Institute of Nutrition in 1950 and initiated the Wheat Industrial Quality Chemical Laboratory in 1957. In the 1960s, she earned an MS in cereals from Kansas State University and a PhD in cereal chemistry and breeding from North Dakota State University, then joined the Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) back in Mexico. 


At CIMMYT, Villegas began working with Dr. Surinder Vasal to develop corn with higher protein and greater nutritional value. Through chemistry and plant breeding, the two produced a QPM variety that not only had high levels of lysine and tryptophan (two important amino acids) but also tasted good. This new maize, which farmers started growing in Ghana and several African countries in the 1990s, quickly proved a success. Children who ate QPM grew faster and had lower incidence of malnutrition disorders than those who did not. For their work, Villegas and Vasal were jointly awarded the World Food Prize in 2000, and Villegas was the first woman to ever receive it. Then-president of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo also granted Villegas the 2000 Woman of the Year Award. 


Villegas served CIMMYT until 1989, traveling the globe to educate young scientists and consult for national research programs in Asia, Africa, and other parts of Latin America. Today, over 75% of the maize grown in Ghana is QPM, and Villegas’ research has nourished millions of children in developing countries. 


Sources & Further Reading 


Dr. Maria Isabel Andrade (1958-Present): The Sweet Potato Savant 

Like Evangelina Villegas before her, Maria Andrade set her sights on another staple food that could be bred to reduce malnutrition: the sweet potato. And, like Villegas, she won a World Food Prize for her work, alongside Drs. Robert Mwanga, Jan Low, and Howarth Bouis in 2016. 


Born in Cape Verde, Andrade received her BS and MS in plant genetics from the University of Arizona and started a vegetable planting program back home on the West African island the following year. She began to wonder if the humble sweet potato could be a solution to drought-related famines as it often bore harvests while other crops withered in the Cape Verde heat. When she headed to North Carolina to complete her PhD in plant breeding, the orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) became her focus.  


During and after her doctorate, Andrade bred sweet potatoes for traits that made them drought-resistant, such as thicker stems, smaller leaves, and insulating canopies that seal in moisture. When the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture sent her to Southern Africa, she learned that vitamin A deficiencies were ravaging Mozambique communities. She set about creating more varieties of high yield, biofortified OFSP to combat this issue alongside Mwanga, Low, and Bouis at the International Potato Center (CIP). 


Andrade and her team also recognized that encouraging adoption of the new OFSP was a social matter, not just a scientific one. They launched a campaign entitled “the sweet that gives health,” which entailed creating new recipes for sweet potatoes using local ingredients like sugarcane, donning bright orange wardrobes, and working with farmers to replace the pale-fleshed, vitamin-poor traditional breeds with the resilient varieties they’d developed. OFSP is now grown everywhere from Cape Verde to Bangladesh, and Andrade continues to fight vitamin deficiency and malnutrition through her work. 


Sources & Further Reading 


Learn About More Women Whose Work Changed Food Systems! 

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Four types of international development organizations and how they work

  • Writer: James Bernard
    James Bernard
  • Dec 14, 2023
  • 7 min read

Updated: Jan 4, 2024

Thousands of organizations are working in developing countries to help improve livelihoods across a broad range or sectors. They are often looking for private sector partners, but unpacking the landscape can be confusing.

Over the last 15 years, I’ve worked in both the private sector and international development sector. As a result, I’ve found myself having to do a lot of translating between these very different worlds; one is driven by profits and revenue, and the other is driven by mission. Timelines, budgets, fiscal cycles are all different and mired in their own complexities.


Lately I’ve been thinking about why it’s so hard for those who work in industry to understand international development (a future blog will look at this from the opposite angle). This came up as we’ve been building the Global Impact Collective over the last several months. A few members of the collective come from more traditional backgrounds, and therefore would never have interacted with international development organizations.


It's not uncommon. Many corporate sustainability and social impact leaders I’ve worked with don’t have a clear understanding of international development organizations, their incentives, and why they might want to work together (or not) to achieve a common goal. This is understandable. Every industry has its own nuances, complexities, competitors, and collaborators.  


If you are a corporate leader who wants to build partnerships with organizations working in international development, it’s first important to understand your own organization’s motivations, objectives, and assets. I can’t stress this enough. It’s very difficult to create effective and sustainable partnerships until you understand what you have to offer, why others would find this valuable, and what you are trying to achieve.


The next thing you should do is conduct a thorough landscape assessment of prospective partners working in the same geographical areas or working to solve the same problems. This will help create a targeted list of organizations and a greater understanding of what they might bring to the table. Key questions are:

  1. How would this partner help advance my organization’s mission or goals in a particular area (geographic, crop, social mission, etc.)?

  2. What assets do they bring to the table – funding, scale, research, etc.?

  3. What other companies are they partnering with?

  4. What is  their mission, incentives, what are their overall objectives, and what kind of timelines do they work on?

  5. What is their primary purpose – implementation, thought leadership, research, funding, scale, etc. – and how, generally, do they work?


In this assessment you will inevitably come across a wide range of organizations with confusing overlaps.  We hope the is a brief primer below will help you unpack some of the confusion. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list or comprehensive categorization. As with anything, there are grey areas, lots of nuance, and different points of view. If you ever find yourself wondering about an organization, feel free to reach out. I’ve probably worked with them.


Bilateral Donors

Bilateral donors provide direct foreign assistance from one government to another. They usually have a permanent presence within the government and are often housed under the department of foreign affairs or another unit that executes foreign policy.


In the United States, the primary foreign aid agency is USAID, a 60-year-old Executive-branch agency which is a critical part of the US foreign assistance budget, which is approved by Congress each year. USAID Administrator Samantha Power was elevated to sit on the National Security Council, which shows the importance of this agency as it relates to foreign policy considerations. In addition to USAID, several other agencies also provide foreign assistance under the same budget line item, including the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and Development Finance Corporation (DFC). Incidentally, the US Foreign Assistance budget is around 1 percent of the overall US Federal Budget, despite a public perception that it runs as high as 25%.


In the UK, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has a similar function to USAID. There’s an alphabet soup of other agencies across the Northern Hemisphere – SIDA (Sweden), DANIDA (Denmark), GIZ (Germany), JICA (Japan) DFAT (Australia). All deliver aid to less-developed nations based on the geopolitical considerations of their governments.


Each bilateral organization has different procurement rules and funding cycles, but many typically use an RFP process that awards contracts or grants to implementers, which can be NGOs or for-profit consultancies. The implementers then execute long-term projects (often five years or more) that run the gamut in terms of scope, sector (agriculture, humanitarian aid, education, etc.) and geographical focus.


There’s a growing trend among these bilateral donors to include a partnership component in their work. USAID, in fact, launched a Private Sector Engagement Policy in 2021 that requires every office and project to include the private sector – whether local or multinational – in project planning and execution.  As part of this initiative, USAID has identified partnership managers throughout the agency and has been training staff around the world on effective partnerships. Dozens of companies have formed successful partnerships with USAID as a result of the policy.


Multilateral Organizations

This is probably the broadest and most confusing category of social-sector organizations because it’s a wide universe with many different players. At a basic level, think about multilateral organizations as membership groups for sovereign states. They were often formed as a result of decades-old treaties or international agreements as a way for nations to work more effectively together. Examples include international bodies such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Economic Forum (WEF); and regional groups like the African Union, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).


I could probably write a thesis about each of these organizations (and I’m sure someone has!). While they all do important work, suffice it to say that they are often large, bureaucratic, and complex entities governed by member states with many competing priorities. The UN system alone, for example, is literally home to dozens of agencies with sometimes overlapping missions, geographies, and projects. For example, UNESCO, UNDP, and UNICEF all have projects and initiatives focused on secondary education.


Many multilaterals invest directly in government projects, research, or multinational missions (such as peacekeeping), although they do offer partnership opportunities with NGOs, corporations, and other organizations. The trick is finding the right person, in the right part of the organization, with the right remit. Unlike the bilateral donors, as a rule, don’t expect multilateral organizations to deploy large cash grants as part of a partnership.


Before developing a partnership with such an organization, make sure you have a strong understanding of the mission and work of the individual division of the agency or unit you are working with and expect each organization to have its own jargon, timelines and ways of working.


A significant subset of multi-lateral organizations are development finance institutions (DFIs) such as The World Bank, The African Development Bank, and the InterAmerican Development Bank. These organizations are funded by member states and are designed to provide financing and funding to governments for a wide range of projects, from infrastructure to economic growth to agriculture. Different DFIs focus on different geographic areas, industries, or sectors.


DFIs are a driving force – although not the only one – behind the growth in innovative financing mechanisms, which seek to tap into the estimated $212 Trillion sitting in private capital today. Because these mechanisms rely partially on investments, rather than grants, there are many opportunities for partnership. However, go in with eyes wide open; these mechanisms are incredibly complex, time consuming, and somewhat experimental. My old firm, Resonance, published a good piece on DFIs.


Family Foundations

Family Foundations are set up by high-net-worth individuals as a way of transferring some of their assets to philanthropic causes that the principles care about. Some of these – The MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation for example – are venerable institutions that have been around for decades. A more recent generation of philanthropists have launched foundations in the last 20-25 years as well, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation, and the Ballmer Foundation. Thousands of smaller family foundations exist across the US (the foundation landscape is quite different in Europe; more on that in another article), and each has a unique focus based on the interests or passions of the founders.


There are many clear examples of strong, market-driven partnerships between family foundations and companies, especially in global health and financial inclusion.


NGOs

In the US, we usually refer to these organizations as “non-profits,” but internationally, mission-driven organizations are often referred to as non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. Larger NGOs like Save the Children, World Vision, Oxfam International, and CARE have dozens of offices around the world, receiving trillions of aggregate dollars from bilateral donors, multilateral organizations, and corporate and individual donors.


These organizations may employ hundreds of local staff who work in country or regional offices, often deploying several projects in a single country. Many NGOs operate on a “federated” model, with fundraising offices in developed countries that raise money for programming. For example, although World Vision’s global headquarters is just south of Seattle, but it also has affiliate organizations in Europe, Australia, the UK, and many other countries. Each raises money to support programs both domestically and in emerging markets. These federated systems leave plenty of room for confusion, lack of clear decision-making, and competing interests between country offices.


Because NGOs are mission-driven organizations, you should take the time to understand the history and motivations of the entity before reaching out for a partnership. Some have faith-based origins or missions – World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, Aga Khan Foundation – while others have grown to focus on single sectors or geographic regions. For example, CARE is strongly focused on providing opportunities for women and girls.


When partnering with NGOs, make sure that mutual goals are well defined and that you set expectations about funding. I was once burned by not understanding this dynamic. Earlier in my career, I developed what I thought was a partnership between a large, US-based education non-profit and the tech company where I worked. I assumed we would mutually bring content, programming and cash to help students gain better access to sciences. What I learned later was that the organization simply wanted a large check to execute on its own programs, with a “sponsorship” from my company. Because it was a transactional agreement, we ended up with very little long-term value. An important lesson in not making assumptions!


 

Hopefully this guide will help you as you navigate the sometimes complex world of social impact partnerships. Again, this is not a comprehensive list, and I recognize that there are many other categories I haven’t covered, including community-based organizations (CBOs), trade and industry associations, regional economic blocs, and academic institutions, to name a few.


Bridging the world of corporate sustainability, social impact, and international development demands not just an understanding of differing objectives and cultures, but a shared vision, forged through deliberate assessment, mutual respect, and a commitment to translating aspirations into impactful partnerships. As we navigate the nuanced landscapes of profit and mission, let us remember: true collaboration knows no boundaries, only the boundless potential to create lasting, transformative change.

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