Women

"People can positively respond to skills, experience and knowledge, and anything else can be made irrelevant."

"The value of investment in science and the appreciation of scientists cannot be overemphasized for our well-being and that of our planet."

"I realized when I was in my first year of university that lifting people out of poverty first and foremost begins with modernizing agriculture and providing access to nutritious and adequate food to all. That is the basis and building block for any development and progress."

"Being back in my continent and working to solve production, environmental and health constraints facing my fellow Africans is very rewarding and fulfilling."

"Gender inequality is a global phenomenon, and I am not immune to that. I think in my case, race played more than gender and when the two are combined, they have a compounded effect. However, I worked very hard to make these “two issues” be eclipsed by my skills, strong work ethics, delivery and a strong track record. It is possible to overcome these through hard work and excellence."

"Life is always a lesson Every day, I learn from everybody."

"I read a lot of biographies."

"It takes a village to raise a child, as our African sayings go... and it takes a global village to generate a successful scientist."

"I consider myself very blessed and fortunate."

"I'm hyper, It's difficult for me to sit and relax."

"Without enough food everything else slides down the priority list. That is why I chose to study agricultural sciences."

"Careers in science can be taxing and highly demanding especially when you must raise all the funds you need to do the job. It requires dedicating long hours to work. However, it is exhilarating and rewarding."

"It is a great privilege to receive an award that combines two of my passions: science and agriculture."

"I am always aware that my personal efforts have been backed by immense support by researchers, graduate students, other staff, partners, my family, and global partners."

"Much of my scientific career has focussed on using molecular tools to address agricultural constraints."

"I witnessed the daily struggle of communities trying to eke a living from their land while fighting a losing battle with pests and other factors."

"I feel extremely fortunate to be recognised by many organisations from different parts of the world."

"I have been continually inspired by the possibility of changing the lives of farmers, moving from a vicious cycle of struggle to a virtuous one of prosperity."

"While icipe generates high quality, world class knowledge, the Centre’s most authentic strength is the success in transforming livelihoods of numerous endusers including farmers."

"You can use science to solve the most critical problems faced by society. You save lives, you improve the quality of life, you tackle environmental issues and so on. What other profession can be more rewarding than this?"

"It is a great honour for me to return to K-State, an institution where I benefited from, and learnt the value of partnerships in science."

"Ask Africa—Can Agribiotech Make the Difference."

"They are there everywhere, small and big."

"We need to boost women's participation in graduate programs at MSc and PhD levels and provide support and well-planned strategies for a career path and growth."

"“In ancient Tibet there was a kind of feudal discrimination against women; however, compared to the fate of Chinese women, Tibetan women had a much better status, almost equal to that of men. » ... “many of the high reincarnations of our lamas are women – so, at least from a religious point of view, women have been well treated”."

"It is clear to see how deeply abortion bans are rooted in white supremacy and patriarchal strongholds when we look at the history of Black women in this country. The tradition of disregarding the humanity of Black people is part of more than 400 years of white supremacist systems in America. Although abortion was legal throughout the country until after the Civil War, there were different rules for enslaved Black women than for white women. Enslaved Black women were valuable property. They didn’t have the freedom to control their bodies, and slave owners prohibited them from having abortions. Under the law, white men owned Black women’s bodies. So, enslaved women who had access to emmenagogic herbs — plants used to stimulate menstruation — had to make remedies to induce their own abortions in secret. When slavery was abolished in 1865, the societal control over Black women’s bodies remained. Today, our white supremacist culture judges Black women for both having children and for having abortions — besetting them with blame for virtually any decision they make and any form of agency they take about their bodies."

"We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other."

"The threat of difference has been no less blinding to people of Color. Those of us who are Black must see that the reality of our lives and our struggle does not make us immune to the errors of ignoring and misnaming difference. Within Black communities where racism is a living reality, differences among us often seem dangerous and suspect. The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity, and a Black feminist vision mistaken for betrayal of our common interests as a people. Because of the continuous battle against racial erasure that Black women and Black men share, some Black women still refuse to recognize that we are also oppressed as women, and that sexual hostility against Black women is practiced not only by the white racist society, but implemented within our Black communities as well. It is a disease striking the heart of Black nationhood, and silence will not make it disappear. Exacerbated by racism and the pressures of powerlessness, violence against Black women and children often becomes a standard within our communities, one by which manliness can be measured. But these woman-hating acts are rarely discussed as crimes against Black women."

""Yes,there might be moment of feeling whereby you want to walk away from God,but the moment you make up your mind to follow him He will help you.""

""Thank God I know he is still there for me. I take all the criticism as corrective""

""There were some things that one must have done in the past as a youth which is called youthful exuberance and which I can no longer do at this stage""

"I had to accept the reality and appreciate God for the gift of life."

""I use everything God has given to me to talk to people.""

"Abortion was an expedient way to frame their campaign to create monopolies on women’s bodies for male doctors. The American Medical Association explicitly contributed to this cause through its exclusion of women and Black people. Today, as people debate whether anti-abortion platforms benefit Black women, the clear answer is no. The U.S. leads the developed world in maternal and infant mortality. The U.S. ranks around 50th in the world for maternal safety. Nationally, for Black women, the maternal death rate is nearly four times that of white women, and 10 to 17 times worse in some states."

"In this country, Black women traditionally have had compassion for everybody else except ourselves. We have cared for whites because we had to for pay or survival; we have cared for our children and our fathers and our brothers and our lovers. History and popular culture, as well as our personal lives, are full of tales of Black women who had “compassion for misguided black men.” Our scarred, broken, battered and dead daughters and sisters are a mute testament to that reality. We need to learn to have care and compassion for ourselves, also."

"l his life, all he ever wanted was to be a teacher, come home from school, sit with his family, and crack jokes till dusk."

"""Only a wife can tell her husband the truth"

"For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others — for their use and to our detriment. The development of self-defined Black women, ready to explore and pursue our power and interests within our communities, is a vital component in the war for Black liberation."

"I am a Muslim who believes in power of death and life. I also know that life and death are in the hand of God"""

"When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers. When feminist theory dismisses us, it encourages its own demise."

"Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare to verbalize our resistance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living — in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us."

"As Black women we have the right and responsibility to define ourselves and to seek our allies in common cause: with Black men against racism, and with each other and white women against sexism. But most of all, as Black women we have the right and responsibility to recognize each other without fear and to love where we choose. Both lesbian and heterosexual Black women today share a history of bonding and strength to which our sexual identities and our other differences must not blind us."

"American Indian women struggle on every front for the survival of our children, our people, our self-respect, our value systems, and our way of life. The past five hundred years testify to our skill at waging this struggle: for all the varied weapons of extinction pointed at our heads, we endure. We survive war and conquest; we survive colonization, acculturation, assimilation; we survive beating, rape, starvation, mutilation, sterilization, abandonment, neglect, death of our children, our loved ones, destruction of our land, our homes, our past, and our future. We survive, and we do more than just survive. We bond, we care, we fight, we teach, we nurse, we bear, we feed, we earn, we laugh, we love, we hang in there, no matter what."

"Through all the centuries of war and death and cultural and psychic destruction have endured the women who raise the children and tend the fires, who pass along the tales and the traditions, who weep and bury the dead, who are the dead, and who never forget. There are always the women, who make pots and weave baskets, who fashion clothes and cheer their children on at , who make fry bread and bread, and corn soup and chili stew, who dance and sing and remember and hold within their hearts the dream of their ancient peoples—that one day the woman who thinks will speak to us again, and everywhere there will be peace."

"Most Indian women I know are in the same bicultural bind: we vacillate between being dependent and strong, self-reliant and powerless, strongly motivated and hopelessly insecure. We resolve the dilemma in various ways: some of us party all the time; some of us drink to excess; some of us travel and move around a lot; some of us land good jobs and then quit them; some of us engage in violent exchanges; some of us blow our brains out. We act in these destructive ways because we suffer from the societal conflicts caused by having to identify with two hopelessly opposed cultural definitions of women. Through this destructive dissonance we are unhappy prey to the self-disparagement common to, indeed demanded of, Indians living in the United States today. Our situation is caused by the exigencies of a history of invasion, conquest, and colonization whose searing marks are probably ineradicable. A popular bumper sticker on many Indian cars proclaims: “If You’re Indian You’re In,” to which I always find myself adding under my breath, “Trouble.”"

"The years between time immemorial and the present are long and bloody and filled with despair. But we cannot despair, we children of the mother, Earth Woman, and the grandmother, Thought Woman. American Indian women not only have endured, but we have grown stronger and more hopeful in the past decade. Our numbers grow, our determination to define ourselves grows, and our consciousness of our situation, of the forces affecting it, and of the steps we can take to turn our situation around grows."

"Modern American Indian women, like their non-Indian sisters, are deeply engaged in the struggle to redefine themselves. In their struggle they must reconcile traditional tribal definitions of women with industrial and postindustrial non-Indian definitions. Yet while these definitions seem to be more or less mutually exclusive, Indian women must somehow harmonize and integrate both in their own lives. An American Indian woman is primarily defined by her tribal identity. In her eyes, her destiny is necessarily that of her people, and her sense of herself as a woman is first and foremost prescribed by her tribe. The definitions of woman’s roles are as diverse as tribal cultures in the Americas. In some she is devalued, in others she wields considerable power. In some she is a familial/clan adjunct, in some she is as close to autonomous as her economic circumstances and psychological traits permit. But in no tribal definitions is she perceived in the same way as are women in western industrial and postindustrial cultures."

"Pre-Conquest American Indian women valued their role as vitalizers. Through their own bodies they could bring vital beings into the world—a miraculous power whose potency does not diminish with industrial sophistication or time. They were mothers, and that word did not imply slaves, drudges, drones who are required to live only for others rather than for themselves as it does so tragically for many modern women. The ancient ones were empowered by their certain knowledge that the power to make life is the source of all power and that no other power can gainsay it. Nor is that power simply of biology, as modernists tendentiously believe."

"The tribes see women variously, but they do not question the power of femininity. Sometimes they see women as fearful, sometimes peaceful, sometimes omnipotent and omniscient, but they never portray women as mindless, helpless, simple, or oppressed. And while the women in a given tribe, clan, or band may be all these things, the individual woman is provided with a variety of images of women from the interconnected supernatural, natural, and social worlds she lives in."

"The oral tradition is vital; it heals itself and the tribal web by adapting to the flow of the present while never relinquishing its connection to the past. Its adaptability has always been required, as many generations have experienced. Certainly the modern American Indian woman bears slight resemblance to her forebears—at least on superficial examination—but she is still a tribal woman in her deepest being. Her tribal sense of relationship to all that is continues to flourish. And though she is at times beset by her knowledge of the enormous gap between the life she lives and the life she was raised to live, and while she adapts her mind and being to the circumstances of her present life, she does so in tribal ways, mending the tears in the web of being from which she takes her existence as she goes."