Jenny (Cairns) Smart is a Senior Program Manager in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit. Since joining IFPRI she has been engaged in areas such as:

• Tracking and informing country-level policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine-Russia conflict global crises of 2022;
• Performing an impact evaluation of the InovAgro market systems development project in northern Mozambique;
• Assessing past trends, current challenges and future scenarios of Ethiopia’s agri-food system (resulting in a book released in 2020);
• Examining returns to public expenditures in Nigeria; and
• Managing the Statistics of Public Expenditures for Economic Development database.

She is also the Senior Program Manager for IFPRI’s Foresight and Policy Country Modeling Team , and was formerly the Program Manager for Flagship 2 of the IFPRI-led CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) on Economywide Factors Affecting Agricultural Growth and Rural Transformation.

Jenny received her MS in Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics from Michigan State University (MSU), after which, she lived for over two years in Maputo, Mozambique where she served as a survey and data analysis advisor for MSU's country program office from 2012 to 2016. During this time, she participated in a USAID-supported trilateral partnership between the US, Brazil, and Mozambique, to provide technical assistance to Mozambique's national food security and nutrition programs. Her specific contributions were in the areas of better understanding the horticulture value chains serving the capital city of Maputo, related concerns surrounding the use of highly toxic pesticides and application practices among producers (these resulted from two large survey endeavors and a special issue collection of resulting reports), the effects of urbanization on diet quality, lessons learned from the partnership model of trilateral cooperation itself, as well as building capacity within the government bodies in tablet-based survey methods, and how to use existing data sources to design and prioritize policies to improve the National Program on School Feeding. Since 2012, she has designed and supervised the implementation of several large and complex household-level agricultural surveys in Mozambique, and has performed the cleaning, organization, and analysis of several types of cross-sectional, panel, and price datasets collected from these surveys, existing national accounts, and other sources.

Prior to having joined MSU's food security group, Jenny interned at the Economic Research Service of the USDA, where she performed analysis related to global total factor productivity (2008) and employment patterns of Mexican migrants to the US (2009). She also spent several months volunteering in Guatemala as a service learner in 2004, in Peru as a volunteer with a nonprofit working in rural development and microfinance in 2006, and participated in an interim abroad study in Guatemala in 2007 and semester abroad study in Kenya in 2008. She is proficient in Portuguese, Spanish and has a basic understanding of Swahili.