Michael Kipkorir Kemboi

The research programme

Research

My work examines the distance between formal policy commitments and lived outcomes. Most of it is situated in African agri-food systems, while an emerging strand applies the same institutional and implementation questions to digital policy and online life. The connecting question throughout: how do policies, institutions and markets translate into outcomes for people, enterprises and communities?

The questions behind the programme

  • Why do some agricultural policies reach implementation while others stall?
  • What allows food systems to remain resilient when disruptions accumulate?
  • How do market and institutional conditions affect food security and livelihoods?
  • How do trade policies translate into agricultural outcomes?
  • How should institutions respond when policy challenges move into digital spaces?

Agricultural policy implementation

Why do some agricultural policies reach implementation while others stall?

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, treating implementation as an empirical question rather than an afterthought of design.

Studies and publications

Geography
Kenya; Global (cross-national)
Methods
Policy and institutional analysis; document analysis; cross-national quantitative comparison
Status
Published work and an ongoing doctoral project

Resilience and disruption

What allows food systems to remain resilient when disruptions accumulate?

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. Current work asks which counties, value chains and institutional arrangements are getting resilience policy right, and what happens to enterprises when several disruptions arrive together.

Studies and publications

Geography
Kenya
Methods
Survey research; econometric analysis (OLS with robust standard errors); descriptive survey analysis
Status
Published work and one working paper

Food security and livelihoods

How do market and institutional conditions affect food security and livelihoods?

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. It connects dietary outcomes to the market and policy conditions households operate within.

Studies and publications

Geography
Liberia; Tanzania; Kenya; Global
Methods
Household-level quantitative analysis; survey data (including FAO fisheries data); qualitative attention to coping and lived experience
Status
Published work

Trade, markets and development

How do trade policies translate into agricultural outcomes?

The oldest strand of the agenda: whether and how trade liberalization contributes to agricultural growth in Kenya, examined with econometric evidence on short- and long-run relationships. Market conditions recur in every other area: they shape the incomes households earn, the prices they face, and the incentives that policy implementation ultimately works through. Work here also examines digital financial inclusion as a market institution.

Studies and publications

Geography
Kenya
Methods
Time-series econometrics; propensity-score matching on Kenya’s Financial Access Survey 2021 (22,024 households)
Status
Published work

Digital policy, rights and society

How should institutions respond when policy challenges move into digital spaces?

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, alongside questions of disinformation and digital financial inclusion.

Studies and publications

Geography
Kenya; Global
Methods
Document review; digital survey; key informant interviews; institutional analysis
Status
Published commissioned report and conference papers
How the work is done

Methodological approach

The research is methodologically plural by design: policy questions, not methods, lead. Quantitative, qualitative, econometric and policy-oriented techniques are combined as each question requires.

Quantitative and econometric analysis

Time-series estimation of short- and long-run policy-growth relationships; OLS with robust standard errors on enterprise survey data; propensity-score matching on Kenya’s Financial Access Survey 2021 (22,024 households).

Survey research

Household-level measurement of food choice, diet quality and food-insecurity experience; enterprise surveys of Kenyan agri-food owner-managers; a digital survey of university students in the TFGBV study.

Qualitative research

Attention to how people describe and manage their circumstances: coping strategies, lived experiences of food insecurity, and key informant interviews with institutional actors.

Policy and institutional analysis

Policy mapping, institutional analysis and comparative policy review: tracing commitments from national strategy documents to implementation on the ground, including a global cross-sectional study of school-meal policies.

Document analysis

Systematic review of curricula, policy documents and programme records, as in the KICTANet study of TFGBV integration in journalism and law school curricula.

Field and assessment work

National learner-assessment fieldwork with the Kenya National Examinations Council, and more than one hundred commissioned research projects for government, NGO and private-sector clients during earlier consulting years.

Tools

Statistical work is carried out in Stata, SPSS and R. Current doctoral research in Public Policy at the University of Nairobi anchors the programme; one result from the enterprise survey can be explored interactively in the Evidence Lab.