Sabina Di Prima is a PhD student at the Athena Institute of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). She conducts transdisciplinary research on the topic of Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture (NSA) addressing issues of food insecurity and malnutrition among vulnerable rural communities in Lao PDR and Vietnam. Her PhD research focuses on comparative case study analyses and the development of a generic framework to scale-up NSA interventions in different contexts. Her research is financed by the NWO-WOTRO Food and Business Global Challenges Programme.
Sabina is also a Sustainable Land Management specialist at the Centre for International Cooperation at the VU (since 2006). The focus of her work is in the areas of food security, natural resource management, climate-smart agriculture, indigenous knowledge, local farmer innovation and rural development. In her work, she embeds participatory, multi-actor and gender-sensitive approaches to promote equitable cooperation and knowledge co-creation. Her tasks encompass design, management and implementation of capacity building and research projects for various donors.
Sabina is a certified university teacher (BKO). She has experience in teaching and coordination of courses at Bachelor and Master levels, supervision of students, training of short courses as well as development of teaching and training material. Since 2014, she has co-facilitated three Preparatory Doctoral tailor-made trainings held at the VU for potential PhD students from Ethiopia and Kenya. She has field experience in technical backstopping and oversight of rural development projects mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa. She was member of the Technical Advisory Group for the UNEP-GEF funded project “Stimulating Community Initiatives in Sustainable Land Management” (SCI-SLM) from 2009 to 2016. She was also a member of the International Support Team and the Programme Oversight Group for the DGIS funded international network programme PROLINNOVA from 2006 to 2010.
Sabina holds a MSc in Environment and Resource Management from the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a BSc in Business and Economics from the University of Catania, Italy. She is a native Italian speaker, speaks fluent English and has a working knowledge of French and Dutch.
