Embedded Files
The following is a brief summary of the recent an ongoing projects that I am leading or have recently led. A more detailed description of these and other projects that I have worked on, and a wide variety of resources and tools can be found at the IBLI team website.
Climate Change, Insurance and Conflict
Conflict is a major impediment to food security and development, and a major cause of human suffering in the drylands of East Africa. Cattle raiding, a primary form of conflict in the region, causes loss of important assets and in some cases, loss of life. In addition to the direct impacts that violence has on victims, the fear of conflict can have broad reaching impacts across society, for example, on where people live, which resources they choose to access, and the livelihood strategies that they employ.
Phase 1 of this agenda (2021-2023) used qualitative research to identify key drivers of of cattle raiding in the drylands of Kenya and Ethiopia. Now if Phase 2 (2023- ongoing), we are testing interventions aimed at mitigation two primary causes of cattle raiding.
Opportunity cost: During times of plenty, the opportunity cost of cattle raiding declines since there is less need of herding labour and the ease and profits from raiding increase because animals are healthier.
Intervention 1 - Paid apprenticeships provide herders with alternative strategies for generating income when their labour is not needed for herding.
Resource scarcity: During periods of drought, pastoralists are more likely to employ risk-prone strategies, such as using contested rangelands or water points, to cope with scarcity. These strategies put them at greater risk of cattle raiding.
Intervention 2 – Insurance that provides pay-outs during droughts can help clients purchase livestock inputs and avoid risky herding strategies to keep animals alive.
We are implementing these two interventions as part of a randomized control trial across 436 pastoral communities in Kenya and Ethiopia. Along side the interventions, are collecting annual household surveys from over 5,000 households.
Improving Dietary and Health Data for Decision-Making in Agriculture and Nutrition Actions in Africa
Child (mal)nutrition is one of the most commonly used indicators for tracking SDG progress and the impacts of development interventions. Unfortunately, conventional methods for collecting child nutrition and health indicators require considerable training, are slow and difficult, and are expensive to collect accurately. The result is that programs operate with a minimum of data, which can mis-represent the situation. Further, such minimalist approaches are prone to systematic errors, exacerbating such prospective mis-representation, and they offer little value to participants during the program itself. The objective of this program is to create a method for collecting and disseminating accurate, low-cost, high-frequency dietary and health data directly from and to households. We propose to do so by developing a mobile-based platform by which households can easily collect, submit, and access information on their children’s nutritional and health status in near-real time and at extremely low cost.
Survey Tools: Caregiver and CHV surey tools
Video: Samburu Implimentation, Marsabit and Kilifi Implimentations
Publications:
Funding Agency: IDRC
Can Asset Transfer & Asset Protection Policies Alter Poverty Dynamics in Northern Kenya?
Graduation programs and drought insurance are being promoted as effective tools for reducing poverty. This project will examine two such programs—the Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) product and the Rural Entrepreneur Access Project (REAP)—both of which are currently operating in high-poverty regions of Northern Kenya and have received international support aimed at reducing poverty. We are implementing a randomized control trial (RCT) consisting of IBLI and REAP interventions in Samburu County of Kenya. The RCT contains four treatment arms: control, only REAP, only IBLI, and REAP + IBLI. A baseline, midline, and endline survey of 1,890 participating households will be collected in 2018, 2020, and 2022, respectively.
Papers
Partners: ILRI, The BOMA Project, Takaful Insurance of Africa, UC Davis
Funding Agency: BASIS MRR, 3ie, IMMANA, bigd-WEE-DeFine
KAZNET-A Universal Micro-Tasking Platform
Reliable information is critical for government and development programs to track and assess their programs to improve the conditions for the poor. At the same time, access to accurate, reliable, and scalable information is severely lacking in rural regions of Sub-Saharan Africa.
KAZNET is a universal micro-tasking platform that we have developed and are currently using to collect livestock market information from pastoral regions of the Kenya as a proof of concept. These markets present an informative case because they are notoriously difficult to monitor due to their often in remote locations and great degree of within and between market variability.
Papers
Photos: here
Partners: ILRI
Funding Agency: Feed the Future - USAID
Creating Informed Demand for Insurance through Digital Extension Education in Kenya
Creating Informed Demand for Insurance through Digital Extension Education in Kenya
Extension and training activities are a major cost for institutions and firms working in remote locations. Furthermore, monitoring the performance of agents and effectiveness of activities adds additional costs.
This project uses experiments to test the use of various mobile technologies to improve training and extension, while also tracking impacts. Technologies employed for teaching and monitoring include mLearning applications, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and SMS-courses. Phase 1 final report here and Phase 2 proposal, which has just been accepted, is found here.
Crowd-Sourcing Rangeland Conditions
This work collected crowd-sourced data on rangeland conditions from pastoralists of northern Kenya in order to improve upon forage maps (poster). Over the 6-month implementation period in Isiolo and Samburu Counties of Kenya, over 120,000 submissions of vegetation density and palatability were submitted by pastoralist.
We ran an experiment using dynamic and spatially varying incentives to learn how mitigate the issue of problem of spatial clustering in crowd-sourced data (working paper). We also ran an experiment testing the use of web-based crowd-sourcing to validate the submission by pastoralists, and remote approaches to improving the quality of the data submitted by pastoralists (working paper).
We are working with remote sensing scientists to classify extensive rangelands using the data submitted. The data is also being used in a Weights and Biases Benchmark under the project Drought Watch.
This work collected crowd-sourced data on rangeland conditions from pastoralists of northern Kenya in order to improve upon forage maps (poster). Over the 6-month implementation period in Isiolo and Samburu Counties of Kenya, over 120,000 submissions of vegetation density and palatability were submitted by pastoralist.
We ran an experiment using dynamic and spatially varying incentives to learn how mitigate the issue of problem of spatial clustering in crowd-sourced data (working paper). We also ran an experiment testing the use of web-based crowd-sourcing to validate the submission by pastoralists, and remote approaches to improving the quality of the data submitted by pastoralists (working paper).
We are working with remote sensing scientists to classify extensive rangelands using the data submitted. The data is also being used in a Weights and Biases Benchmark under the project Drought Watch.
Ethiopia (2012-2014)
Household Economic Survey, International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). This survey is part of an ongoing panel of 550 households examining household economic conditions. Data can be found here.
Pastoralist Migration Survey, International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). This research collects information on pastoralist herding decisions using a household survey and livestock GPS collars.
Climate Change and Pastoralist Adaptation, National Science Foundation funded Integrative Graduate Education & Research Traineeship, Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), ILRI. The objective of this research was to assess the impacts that climate change is having on pastoralists in southern Ethiopia and to inventory the coping strategies that they are using in response. The outputs include a report and a poster.
Funding agency: CCAFS, USAID, Australian AID
Bolivia (2009-2011)Livelihood Strategies in the Bolivian Altiplano, Graduate Research Assistant, Dept. of Agriculture & Applied Economics, University of Missouri. Spatial and statistical analysis of household survey data from the Bolivian Altiplano focused on the environmental impacts of changes to livelihood strategies.
Barriers to Market Integrations, Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM CRSP) funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Dorris and Christine Brown and University of Missouri. This research focused on the barriers to market entry faced by small holder households on the Altiplano of Bolivia.
Funding Agency: SANREM CRSP, USAID
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