CIMMYT reviews

HUGE pay and benefits gap between national and international employees. This reality creates tension and an almost colonial feel to the institutional hierarchy. CIMMYT struggles to play well with local national/host country institutions. There is often an impression (mostly unfair) of CIMMYT as elitist and somewhat of an ivory tower. CIMMYT often lacks the institutional ability to navigate local politics, institutional relations, etc. because it is an agricultural scientific organization run by agricultural scientists. This results, often, in good science not making it to the field or to the intended recipients.

Too much politics. In half of the departments the heads/directors reward loyalty instead of performance or capacity. There is still considerable discrimination vs national staff (normally paid 1/5 of foreigners), vs women, vs young staff and vs administrative staff (scientist are always right whether they actually know what are they talking about or not). There is no professional development plans and most supervisors are appointed because of personal favors or because they are technically good in their field but not because they know how to supervise. There is a lot of harassment and the compliance officer only takes care of cases where the harasser is not her friend.