William Matovu 2024 Speaker

Country Director/Africa Country Strategy Lead, Africa Program

Heifer International

Biography

WILLIAM MATOVU serves as the Country Director for Heifer International in Uganda where he leads on developing and executing development programs that are geared toward transforming the lives of smallholder farmers, Youth and Women. With 20 years hands-on work experience managing food security, sustainable environment management, livelihoods, economic empowerment, and youth focused programs, through various development organizations, William has led teams to deliver result that demonstrate scale, partnerships and permanence of impact.

William holds and MBA and is passionate about business models to solve development challenges and thus believes in facilitating markets work for the poor. He has set up and incubated smallholder farmer businesses, Women, and youth focused MSMEs from zero revenue to positing hundreds of thousands of US dollar annual turnover.
He has also published the following articles: -Article in the Agricultural Finance Yearbook 2013, Bank of Uganda and Plan for modernization of agriculture, “Update on the Effectiveness and Replicability of the “Hub Approach” to the Management of Risk in Dairying in Uganda and Kenya. Article in the East Africa Agribusiness magazine issue 02- September 2012 “The start, collapse and revival of Uganda’s Dairy Industry”. Article in the Agricultural Finance Yearbook, 2009, Bank of Uganda and Plan for modernization of agriculture, “Dairy Investments by smallholder farmers”. Author, 2007, Gender mainstreaming strategy for the National Organic Agriculture Movement of Uganda. Co-author in a Peer Reviewed Journal: MDPI; Improving Health and Wealth by Introduction of an Affordable Bacterial Starter Culture for Probiotic Yoghurt Production in Uganda, 2019. Since 2022, William has been a panel discussant at the African Food systems convening organized by AGRA.