Gaël Lescornec
Program Manager, Living Income
Gaël Lescornec is Program Manager on cocoa and the food security advisor at IDH. She has been working nearly 20 years trying to find solutions for more sustainable development practices to achieve better equity. This has included working in UN refugee camps in Rwanda in the late 1990s, coordinating stakeholders around national public health planning processes in several countries across Sub-Saharan Africa led by the UN and the World Bank, developing CSR strategies with multi-national companies in Southern Africa including SAB-Miller, leading sustainability initiatives in the vanilla sector in Uganda supported by Danida and more recently representing the World Cocoa Foundation in Europe from 2015-2018 mobilizing partnerships around CocoaAction. Since joining IDH in 2019, Gaël has led the Cocoa Nutrition Initiative as well driving efforts to improve Living income among smallholder cocoa farmers with value chain actors. She has also been working with Farmfit and IDH more broadly to integrate food security and nutrition in Service Delivery Models. Being part of IDH has enabled her to bridge her passions for good development practice and for transformation of markets and value chain actors to achieve genuine sustainable impact.
