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Maria Veronica Gottret

Bio

Maria Veronica Gottret is currently a Senior Technical Advisor for Agriculture and Livelihoods Research at Catholic Relief Services (CRS). She is a social scientist with a PhD in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Sciences, The Netherlands, and an MS and BS in Food and Resource Economics from University of Florida, USA. She has 27 years of experience in research and development. In her current position she led CRS Agriculture and Livelihoods (A&L) Program in the development of its theory of change and corresponding learning agenda and agency-level performance metrics, has been working in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia to advance this work. This includes assessing smallholder advances along a pathway to prosperity and resilience; formative research on the role of agriculture for improving nutritional outcomes; and operations research to assess the impact of CRS approach for capacity building in A&L programming (branded as SMART Skills) in generating desired behavioral changes and livelihood outcomes. She is passionate about working at the interface between research and development, which started while working at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) as an economist (1990-2006) and continued when she joined the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) as value chain specialist in the Mesoamerican Agro-environmental Program (2006 – 2012).