Dilini
Abeygunawardane
Research Associate
Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO)
Dilini has a background that cuts across agrarian development, ecology, and natural resource management. Her current work focuses on large-scale agriculture in emerging agricultural frontiers in Southern and Eastern Africa, impacts of agricultural intensification, and farm-size productivity relationship. Before joining IAMO, Dilini worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium. Prior to that she did consultancy work for the CGIAR research centers IWMI and WorldFish undertaking projects in the fields of monitoring and evaluation, institutional and policy analysis, and decision support systems development. She has extensive fieldwork experience working in Sub-Saharan Africa and South and South East Asia. She holds a PhD in environmental management from The University of Queensland, Australia (2014). Dilini is particularly interested in tackling issues in rural development and agrarian reform and is passionate about finding solutions to that end. Backed by her experiences in development research across Africa and Asia, Dilini is working on building a platform for research, knowledge exchange, and agrarian development in rural Sri Lanka. The research hub will work toward, liaising international knowledge and technology transfers, promoting agricultural entrepreneurship, and enabling alternative livelihoods to farming.