The research programme

Agricultural policy implementation

Agricultural policy in Africa is rarely short on ambition; the difficulty lies in delivery. This line of work examines how political commitment, institutional coordination and implementation capacity influence agricultural policy outcomes — why some policy instruments are adopted and enforced while others stall between announcement and practice, and what that gap means for the households the policy was meant to reach.

It treats implementation as an empirical question rather than an afterthought of design: mapping the institutions responsible, tracing where authority and resources actually flow, and assessing whether stated policy goals translate into measurable outcomes on farms and in markets.

Resilience and disruption

How agricultural systems, enterprises and institutions anticipate, absorb and respond to disruption. Resilience here is not a slogan but a measurable property of a food system: whether actors can prepare for shocks, maintain function while they hit, and reorganise afterwards without lasting damage to livelihoods.

The Kenyan case is the current focus — asking which counties, value chains and institutional arrangements are getting resilience policy right, and what distinguishes them from peers facing similar climatic and economic pressures. The question matters because resilience has become a central objective of agricultural policy across the region, with uneven evidence on what actually builds it.

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Food security and livelihoods

How policy, livelihoods and market conditions influence food access, dietary outcomes and social sustainability. This work moves food security beyond national supply statistics to the household level, where availability, access, utilisation and stability are actually experienced — and where gendered livelihoods shape who eats what, and when.

Empirical studies in this area have examined the food choice and diet quality of women in fishing households in Tanzania; the coping strategies and food-insecurity experiences of female-headed agricultural households in Liberia; and, comparatively, how national policies across the world aim to improve micronutrient intake through school meals. Together they connect dietary outcomes to the market and policy conditions that households operate within.

Trade, markets and development

How trade policy and market conditions translate into agricultural growth and food outcomes. This is the oldest strand of the agenda: the question of whether and how trade liberalization contributes to agricultural growth in Kenya, examined with econometric evidence on short- and long-run relationships.

It remains the analytical backbone of the wider programme. Market conditions recur in every other area — they shape the incomes that households earn, the prices they face, and the incentives that policy implementation ultimately works through. Understanding the trade-growth link is therefore a precondition for understanding everything downstream of it.

Digital policy, rights and society

The newest area asks what happens when the same policy questions move online. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is a pervasive problem in Kenyan universities, yet the curricula that train the journalists who will report on it — and the lawyers who will litigate it — rarely address it. This line of work examines that gap empirically: how law and journalism programmes currently integrate TFGBV, what students experience and need, and which institutional responses actually work.

As lead researcher and curriculum consultant for the Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet), he directed the national study published as Exploring TFGBV Integration in Journalism and Law School Curricula: A Kenyan Perspective (KICTANet Report No. 34, 2025) — combining document review, a digital survey and key informant interviews, and proposing a skills-training framework for educators and policy recommendations for updating university syllabi. Related work examines digital financial inclusion and financial health among Kenyan women, and conference papers have explored countering political disinformation through AI-based learning platforms and youth social-media literacy.