Our Team.
Warren van Niekerk
Director
A Director of Africawide Consulting. His skills include project management and people liaison required for forming and working in multidisciplinary teams. Warren has extensive experience as owner of a variety of agricultural businesses and therefore understands the aspects of agribusiness in relation to production, marketing and distribution realities.
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He holds an MSc Agric from the University of Natal, South Africa and has been consulting in the agribusiness/farm planning and rural development field since 2001. Warren has considerable experience in working with smallholder growers and has been involved in IFC compliant compensation, livelihood restoration and community development planning and implementation on a range of resettlement projects. He believes passionately that livelihood restoration should be underpinned by the principles of inclusive consultation, livelihood improvement and empowerment of project-affected people.
He has also worked extensively in the related fields of enterprise development and value chain studies usually required in establishing businesses and has performed management consulting in agriculturally based businesses that required restructuring.
Warren has worked in a wide range of developing countries including: Swaziland, South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Malawi, Sudan, Liberia, Congo Brazzaville, Guinea Bissau, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Madagascar, Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates.
Specialist skills: Strategic planning, livelihood restoration and development, land-use planning, compensation, enterprise development, outgrower specialist, value chain studies.
Renate van Niekerk
Director
A Director of Africawide Consulting who has an MSc Agric from the University of Natal. She has been involved as a consultant with the planning and implementation of a number of agricultural enterprises in Southern Africa.
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Renate has experience in horticultural production, as well as sustainable and responsible agriculture. She lectured at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) and has extensive experience in teaching, training, and knowledge transfer. Renate is proficient in the coordination of information from different sources, the review of the literature, and the compilation of reports.
Specialist skills: Outgrower development, inclusive development, integrated land-use planning, food security, livelihood improvement, report compilation, desktop and background research.
Rory Hickson
Rory Hickson holds an MSc Hydrology from the University of Natal, South Africa. He has almost 20 years’ experience in GIS, Airborne Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry, Environmental Impact Assessments, and Hydrological Modelling. Rory has been involved with the setup and management of several GPS-based asset surveys for resettlement action plans and livelihood restoration plans in various African countries. This entailed electronic in-field data collection, analysis, manipulation and linking these databases to relevant GIS layers.
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He has also worked extensively on GIS-based land-use classes and identification. This involves managing the capture of land use classes from remote sensed digital imagery and analysing the data to provide land use classification. Rory is a fully certified drone operator of both fixed-wing and quadcopter type drones. Rory has worked extensively all over Southern Africa and is also skilled in project and people management.
Specialist skills: GIS, Airborne Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry, Environmental Impact Assessments, and Hydrological Modelling.
Nic Powell
Nic Powell matriculated in 2012 and started to work as a horse trainer and manager. His interest in Agriculture led him to obtain a National Diploma and B.tech in Agricultural management from Cedara College of Agriculture and Nelson Mandela University. He has recently completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management and Administration through Stellenbosch Business School.
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During his studies, he worked full-time at a number of agricultural enterprises which helped him gain a wide spectrum of knowledge and skills in the agricultural field. Nic has excellent critical thinking and problem-solving skills and combined with his practical nature means that he is well suited to implementation projects. He enjoys working with people and has good communication and management skills.
Specialist skills: Farm/ Project Management, agronomy, animal husbandry, implementation