Last week after the Worldwatch Institute’s 15th Annual State of the World 2011 Symposium at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC on January 19, 2011, two visiting panelists took a tour of the White House. It was the first time that Edward Mukiibi, co-founder and project coordinator of Developing Innovations in School Cultivation(DISC) project, from Uganda and Sithembile Ndema, Project Manager for the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), from Zimbabwe had been to the United States.
There, in the Blue Room, in honor of the two year anniversary of the inauguration, Michelle Obama waited to greet them. After shaking the First Lady’s hand, both Ndema and Mukiibi told her about the work they are doing with theater and school gardens to educate their communities about sustainable agriculture.
To learn more about Mukiibi and Ndema’s work, cread: How to Keep Kids ‘Down on the Farm,’Cultivating a Passion for Agriculture, Acting it Out for Advocacy and But Who Can Listen?: FANRPAN Launches Theater for Policy Advocacy Campaign in Rural Malawi.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
