Consortium Leadership Team

Gerard O’Donoghue, an Irish national, brings to the Consortium a wealth of finance, management and professional leadership experience. Engaged with the CGIAR system since the early 1990s, Gerard has a demonstrated commitment to best practice; implementing improvements to facilitate the science at both the institute and system-wide level.

Whilst with Price Waterhouse, based in the City of London, Gerard’s work ranged from auditing to corporate finance with a broad spectrum of high profile clients. This took him to many locations as disparate as the New York Stock Exchange and the South of Sudan.

Gerard joined the Consortium from Bioversity International, in Italy, where he was the Director of Corporate Services. Prior to this he was DDG (Operations) at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Sri Lanka. From 1998 to 2001, Gerard was at the World Bank, in Washington DC, where he served as the Senior Finance Officer at the CGIAR Secretariat. Previously, Gerard was the Chief Financial Officer at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in Kenya, after being an active part of the team who created the new institute from the International Research Centre for Africa (ILCA), where he worked in Ethiopia, and the International Laboratory for Research into Animal Disease (ILRAD).

Gerard is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England & Wales and also studied Professional Management at the University of York, England. He is currently on the Board of Directors at AIARC and on the Board of Governors at St George’s British International School in Rome.