Doctor Gideon Onumah
Nationality: Ghana
Year: 1996
Subject Area: Social Sciences
Gideon Onumah, a Ghanaian national, won Wingate Foundation funding for a study on “The role of the state in rural finance systems in developing economies: a case study of Ghana” in 1996. The study was part of a PhD programme which Gideon successfully completed at the (now) International Development Department of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
Following that programme, Gideon joined the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) of the University of Greenwich as a Rural Finance and Agricultural Marketing specialist in 1999. His major area of work in rural and micro-finance, since joining NRI, has been in helping to develop systems to facilitate commodity trade and finance, including the institutional, regulatory and policy framework required to make liberalised commodity markets in developing countries more efficient but also accessible to smallholder farmers. He has managed programmes to successfully establish warehousing and inventory credit systems, which help to achieve this aim, for the grain and oilseed sector in Zambia as well as for export commodities (coffee and cotton) in Tanzania and Uganda. He is leading work on developing financial products that combine weather-indexed insurance with production credit and inventory finance and is also part of an international team that is working on mechanisms and institutional arrangements to empower smallholder producers in markets.