Willem is a result oriented project manager with over 20 years of international work experience covering policy research, private sector development, and inclusive business in agriculture and food security, renewable energy and public private partnerships, with an extensive record of securing funds from private sector and bi- and multilateral donors.

Droughts, with their increasing frequency of occurrence, especially in the Greater Horn of Africa (GHA), continue to negatively affect lives and livelihoods. For example, the 2011 drought in East Africa caused massive losses documented to have cost the Kenyan economy over $12bn.Consequently, the demand is ever-increasing for ex-ante drought early warning systems with not only the ability to offer drought forecasts with sufficient lead times but that are both stable and are of high bias. In this study, we build predictive models one month ahead for both drought severity and drought effects.

Technovataion girls is an international competition for high school girls being run in Kenya by the Safaricom women in tech .It aims at giving high school  girls a platform to showcase their problem-solving skills and to enhance their innovativeness .In teams of about 5,the girls identify a problem in their immediate environment and come up with a mobile-based application that solve  the problem.