Dr. Shaun Ferris has worked for the past 10 years for Catholic Relief Services (CRS). In his current position, Shaun focuses on supporting smallholder farmers along the pathway to prosperity, as part of CRS’ Signature Program Area for Agriculture. His work at CRS also focuses on building the agro-enterprise capacity of field staff, finding ways of generating value at the farm level through new combinations of skills acquisition, technology and market opportunity identification, and finding ways to improve information use and trading relationships. Shaun is currently working with a cross-agency team on generating agro-enterprise content for cloud based distance learning systems and creating farmer-facing business tools using ICT solutions.

Previously, Dr. Shaun Ferris worked 16 years with the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research. Over the course of his career, he has collaborated with several major agencies on both short and long term projects including USAID, the World Bank, USDA, FAO, UNCTAD, DFID, and IFAD.

Shaun holds a Bachelor’s in Horticultural Science from Reading University, a Master’s in Tropical Agriculture from Nottingham University and a PhD in Plant Physiology from Cranfield University.