Jenny (Cairns) Smart is a Senior Program Manager in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, based in Washington, DC. She has been the Senior Program Manager for the IFPRI-led CGIAR Initiative on Fragility, Conflict and Migration since its launch in April of 2023, and also offers cross-cutting program management support to the ILRI-led CGIAR Initiative on Gender Equality. Prior to this, Jenny was Senior Program Manager of IFPRI’s Foresight and Policy Country Modeling Team since December of 2020, and was a Flagship Manager of the IFPRI-led CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) on Economywide Factors Affecting Agricultural Growth and Rural Transformation, from 2019 to 2022.
Since joining IFPRI, she has also engaged in research, with highlights in the following areas:
Jenny received her MS in Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics from Michigan State University (MSU), after which, she lived in Maputo where she served as a survey and data analysis advisor for MSU’s Mozambique country program office from 2012 to 2016. During this time, she led two large data collection efforts, in collaboration with the national agricultural research service of Mozambique (IIAM), as part of an emergent trilateral partnership between the US, Brazil, and Mozambique funded by USAID and the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC), to provide technical assistance to Mozambique’s national food security and nutrition programs. She authored several resulting studies from the use of these data which provided a better understanding of the horticulture value chains serving Maputo and related concerns surrounding the use of highly toxic pesticides and application practices among producers (see these and others in this ‘special issue collection’, edited by Jenny). Proceeding from this assignment, she also went on to publish on the effects of urbanization on diet quality in Mozambique, lessons learned from the partnership model of trilateral cooperation itself, how to use existing data sources to design and prioritize policies to improve the National Program on School Feeding, and broadly, she contributed insights and built increased local capacity in relation to tablet-based survey design in country. Since 2014, she has designed and supervised the implementation of other large and complex household-level agricultural surveys in Mozambique related to IFPRI’s InovAgro impact evaluation, and is well versed in cleaning, organization, and STATA analysis of various types of cross-sectional, panel, price datasets, as well as existing national accounts data, among others.
Prior to her post within 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.
