Felix Kwame Yeboah

About Felix Kwame Yeboah

Felix Kwame Yeboah is a nonresident fellow of global food & agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Dr. Yeboah is an interdisciplinary researcher, teacher, and bridge-builder with over a decade of experience providing critical analysis and consultation to inform a range of social policies in both the US and Africa. Presently, he is an Assistant Professor of International Development at Michigan State University, where he also provides leadership and administrative oversight for the MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program, an initiative that equip young Africans with relevant competencies for transformative leadership, career success, and a life of service. He is also a Non-resident Fellow of Global Food and Agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a Goodwill Ambassador of the Young African Leadership Initiative (YALI) Regional Leadership Center for West Africa.

His research draws on a broad spectrum of methodologies and applies economic and sociopsychological theories to address questions at the nexus of agricultural and food systems, environment and natural resources, and labor market issues. For the past decade, his research efforts have focused on economic transformation processes in emerging economies, with an emphasis on the intersection between agricultural and food systems’ transformation and youth livelihoods. Through this line of work, he has contributed valuable insights into labor force and sectoral employment trends, emerging social, economic, and environmental forces shaping employment growth, and strategic pathways for accelerating job creation and economic transformation, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. His previous research also includes studies examining the human dimension of environmental change and sustainable community development issues.

Dr. Yeboah’s scholarship has been successfully applied in various contexts. Notably, his work was integral to The MasterCard Foundation’s and the German Development Cooperation’s (GIZ) strategies addressing youth employment challenges in Africa. His research also supported Michigan’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development’s efforts to combat non-point source pollution in the Great Lakes through the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, and strategic change initiatives to advance campus sustainability at Michigan State University. More recently, he served as the lead author for the 2018 Global Food Security Report commissioned by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs to advise the US Government’s strategies to address youth employment challenges in developing countries in Africa, Latin America and South Asia. He also made significant contributions to the 2016 and 2021 editions of Africa’s Agriculture Status Report, and the 2019 Rural Development Report, the flagship reports of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), respectively. In 2012, he was recognized as a Milton H. Steinmueller scholar of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and a George and Nancy Axinn fellow of International Development.

Dr. Yeboah holds a Masters and Ph.D. in Environmental Policy and International Development, with specializations in Environment and Resource Economics from Michigan State University, USA and a Bachelor’s in Natural Resource Management from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, West Africa. He was also a John M. Gunn Exchange Scholar at Washington and Lee University, USA.