-Her nomination by Pres. Weah brings new lease on life for the country’s Agriculture sector
If given the chance to apply her professional and technical knowledge without undue political interference, she’s poised and well positioned to turn Liberia’s Agricultural sector around in a reasonably short period of time.
That was what many who knows Ms. Jeanine Cooper’s track record thought on Thursday, January 16, 2020, when the Executive Mansion announced that President George Manneh Weah has nominated Ms. Jeanine Cooper as Liberia’s new Minister of Agriculture. Her nomination is subject to confirmation by the Honorable Liberian Senate.
She comes to this post as founder and head of Fabrar Liberia, a successful rice processing and marketing company designed to significantly impact agribusiness in rural communities.
According to an Executive Mansion press release, her nomination to replace former Minister Mogan Flomo came “following months of a rigorous vetting process. Ms. Cooper replaces Dr. Mogana Flomo who was relieved of his duties on June 29, 2019.”
Prior to her appointment, Ms. Jeanine Cooper served as Managing Director of FABRAR-Liberia Enterprise Limited. FABRAR, an organization she founded in 2009, specializes in processing and marketing local agriculture and food products for domestic consumption and export.
From a micro-milling operation and purchasing rice from smallholder farmers, FABRAR under her watch has become one of Liberia’s largest rice producers, supplying food products to schools and other institutions, including supermarkets and retailers.
Ms. Cooper, a multilingual, worked for the United Nations System for 13 years—her last posting being Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the African Union and the Economic Commission for Africa. She was also Head of the Liaison Office for the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA), posting with the UN-OCHA in Kenya and for the Eastern and Southern Africa region.
Ms. Cooper’s career spanned an additional 10 years of humanitarian work with international NGOs and charitable institutions in Africa. She worked with the first team of Mèdecins Sans Frontières (Belgium), which worked in Liberia during the civil war in 1990–1996.
The newly nominated Minister of Agriculture founded a local NGO in Liberia, the Children’s Assistance Program (CAP), which has served youth since 1991 and is a leading partner in child development. Ms. Cooper also managed humanitarian programs in northeastern Kenya and southern Somalia with Vétérinaires Sans Frontières-Suisse from 1991-2003.
Ms. Cooper has also supported community-initiated agricultural projects and served on the board of directors of developmental bodies and educational institutions in Liberia and in Côte d’Ivoire.
She graduated from the College of West Africa and holds Master of Science degree in Managing Rural Change from Imperial College from the University of London in 2003. She earlier graduated from Michigan State University, United States of America in 1982 with Bachelor of Arts (BA) degrees in Business Administration and French.
Ms. Cooper earned a distinction for her dissertation on “Capitalizing on Liberia’s Rubber Sector to Anchor Post-Conflict Reconstruction”. She completed several certificate courses in Financing for Development and Public-Private Partnerships as well as Business and Entrepreneurship.
She has published several blogs and short stories.
Below is a profile of Fabrar Liberia, the brain child of the incoming Agriculture Minister, Jeanine Cooper:
Fabrar Liberia is a rice processing and marketing company located in the heart of Liberia’s rice growing belt whose principal mission is to improve farming livelihoods by helping Liberian farmers gain access to previously unreachable national and international food markets.
The company is a social-enterprise designed to positively influence agri-business in the rural communities of Liberia by combining a sound business model for the commercialization of locally grown rice with good social practice.
Fabrar therefore uses a commercial arm that adds value to, and creates a market for, Liberia’s agricultural products, while its social arm builds the capacity of its smallholder farmers and provides gainful market access that allows them to grow their farms and businesses sustainably. Through these activities, Fabrar is building a solid consumer demand for high quality domestically produced rice while also raising farm incomes and positively impacting the socio-economic wellbeing of the people it works with.