Olga Mapanje

Olga Mapanje is a PlanAdapt fellow based in Pretoria, South Africa.

She is an agricultural economist and researcher, specializing in rural development and sustainability issues in smallholder agriculture. Her expertise and areas of interest particularly lie in climate finance for climate risk management in the agricultural sector. Olga is currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Rural Development Planning at the University of Pretoria. Her research which is themed around climate finance is funded under the Southern Africa Climate Finance Partnership (SACFP) a multi-country, knowledge sharing, and capacity enhancement platform facilitated by SouthSouthNorth (SSN). This is part of the SACFP program on Catalysing Climate Finance for the Southern African Development Community.

In addition, she is working as a research fellow at the African Centre for a Green Economy where she is involved in supporting the planning and organization of the centre’s events and preparing the organization’s research outputs such as reports and policy briefs. Prior to that, Olga worked as a lecturer at the Midlands State University in Zimbabwe, where she was involved in teaching undergraduate courses, guiding students in their research projects, and undertaking personal research projects. As part of her M.Sc. research, Olga worked as a research fellow for the Scaling up Climate Change Adaptation (SCCA) project which was implemented in Zimbabwe by Oxfam and funded by the Global Environment Facility. Throughout her career, Olga has published academic papers which are focused on climate change adaptation, food systems, and sustainable agriculture in developing countries.

She holds a Master of Science in Agricultural and Applied Economics and a Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Economics from the University of Zimbabwe.

For more info, please visit Olga’s ResearchGate or LinkedIn profile