Edilegnaw Wale Zegeye

Biography

Dr.Edilegnaw Wale Zegeye is currently a Senior lecturer in Agricultural Economics, School of Agricultural, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (UKZN), South Africa. At the University, he teaches various courses such as Agricultural Policy, Micro-economics applied to agriculture, Farm Management, Farm Financial Management and Agricultural Price analysis. He supervises PhD and MSc students on their postgraduate thesis work. He is currently supervising 9 PhD and 8 MSc candidates at UKZN. One PhD and 11 MSc candidates have successfully graduated under his supervision. Before joining the University in early 2009 as a senior lecturer, he had been working with the Genetic Resources Policy Initiative (GRPI) project of Bioversity International in Kenya as an economist (2007-2009), and Post-Doc fellow, University of Bonn (2006-2007). He holds a PhD (2004) in Agricultural Economics from the University of Bonn and MSc (1997) in Agricultural Development Economics from Wageningen University (The Netherlands), both with distinction. In 2006, his PhD thesis won an award “Prize of Friends of ZEF” selected as the best doctoral thesis of the years 2003 and 2004, Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn. Having completed his BSc (1993) in Agricultural Economics, distinction, he began his career at Alemaya University in Ethiopia where he served for six years (1994-5; 1997-2000 and 2004) in various capacities. He has also been a consultant to IFPRI/ILRI and Bioversity International (the then IPGRI), among others. His major areas of research interest include agricultural biodiversity, agricultural and food policy, and the economics of agricultural technology adoption. He has published 25 papers in international refereed journals including Ecological Economics, Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, African Development Review, Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, Biodiversity and Conservation, African Journal of Agricultural Research, Quarterly Journal of International Agriculture, Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution, Water SA and Agrekon. He has also authored and co-authored contributed book chapters (7), edited conference proceedings (7), and contributed to peer-reviewed proceedings papers (5). He has also presented contributed papers in various international, regional and national conferences. He is a member of various professional associations and reviewer of various refereed journals. He is on the editorial board of “The International Journal of Biodiversity and Conservation”.

Research Interest

Natural Resources Economics; Development Bio-Economics ; Cost Benefit Analysis; Impact Assessment; Household Survey Design and Implementation.