Akissa Bahri is a professor, researcher and author in water resources development and management. Areas she extensively researched and wrote about include agricultural use of brackish and reclaimed waters and biosolids, and their respective environmental impact and water use efficiency. She held the positions of Advisor to the Chief of Government, Minister of Agriculture, Water Resources and Fisheries and Secretary of State in charge of Water Resources. She was a Professor at the National Agricultural Institute of Tunisia, and earlier she worked as Coordinator of the African Water Facility (AWF) at the African Development Bank; as Director for Africa at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), based in Accra, Ghana; and as Director of Research at the National Research Institute for Agricultural Engineering, Water and Forestry in Tunisia (INRGREF). She holds an Agricultural Engineer degree and a Doctor-Engineer degree from the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse, France, and a Ph.D. from Lund University, Sweden. She is a member of the World Academy of Sciences, the African Academy of Sciences and the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts. She has received international honors from the Guinness Foundation (1984), the International Foundation for Science (1993), the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (1996), the 2009 "Prof. C.N.R. Rao Prize for Scientific Research", and the International Water Association (2018). She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California at Davis from January to June 2005.