Akissa Bahri

Professor Akissa Bahri is a Tunisian agricultural engineer. She brings extensive experience in water resources management, with particular expertise in the agricultural use of marginal waters, biosolids, and their environmental impacts. Professor Bahri served as Tunisia’s Minister of Agriculture, Water Resources and Fisheries from 2020 to 2021, following her role as Secretary of State for Water Resources and Professor at the National Agricultural Institute of Tunisia. Her international career includes serving as Director for Africa at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) based in Accra, Ghana (2005–2010), and as Coordinator of the African Water Facility (2010–2015) at the African Development Bank. Earlier, she was Director of Research at Tunisia’s National Research Institute for Agricultural Engineering, Water and Forestry.

Her contributions to science and water management have been widely recognized. She has received honors from the Guinness Foundation (1984), the International Foundation for Science (1993), and the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (1996). She was awarded the 2009 Prof. C.N.R. Rao Prize for Scientific Research and the International Water Association’s “Women in Water” Award in 2018. In 2005, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Davis. Professor Bahri holds an Agricultural Engineering degree from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Agronomie de Toulouse, a Doctor-Engineer degree from the Institute National Polytechnique de Toulouse, and a Ph.D. in Water Resources Engineering from Lund University.