Amanda L. Rose

Amanda L. Rose serves as an agri-food systems lead for RTI within the Center for Applied Economics and Strategy. She is a highly skilled agri-food systems practitioner, strategic advisor, and project manager. With over 15 years of experience, Ms. Rose is an expert in designing, supporting, and monitoring progress in agri-food systems programming in the U.S., Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. She combines a generative mindset for envisioning future change with a unique skillset in group facilitation, research, strategy, and project management. Ms. Rose is passionate about people, places, and work of agriculture informed by her experience growing up on her family’s cotton and peanut farm in Eastern North Carolina.

Recently, Ms. Rose led a five-year initiative to advance systems measurement and learning for a global philanthropic donor investing in country-led agricultural transformation in Africa and Asia. In this role, she managed a specialized team of RTI experts and three technical partner organizations in enabling their client to sustainably track progress and use evidence to adaptively manage programming. In this role, she co-designed a ‘Scaling Readiness’ framework to enable philanthropic program officers to holistically consider scaling barriers and partnership needs in their agricultural innovation investments.

Amanda currently serves as the RTI lead for a collaborative National Science Foundation project to advance a place-based agtech innovation corridor serving Eastern and Western North Carolina, led by North Carolina Agriculture and Technical State University (NCA&T). Additionally, Ms. Rose serves as senior advisor for a range of agri-food systems projects across the Institute. Her research-to-practice interests include measuring progress in complex systems; technology adoption in organizational and market contexts; and participatory design and engagement in agricultural research.

Before joining RTI in 2018, Ms. Rose served clients in various advisory capacities, providing strategic recommendations, innovation policy advice, research, and analysis. Some of her clients include: the Rockefeller Foundation, the US Agency for International Development, the Government of the Republic of Rwanda, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Ms. Rose's publications include The Thou Shalt Nots of Systems Change, Opportunities for AgriFood Tech in Western North Carolina, and the North Carolina Innovation Corridor AgTech Market Insights and Cluster Analysis.