I am an Economist Research Fellow at the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research UNU-WIDER on the SA-TIED Program. Before my current position, I was an academic Staff at the Department of Economics, University of Rwanda (UR). I also served as the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Admin. & Finance at Rwanda Polytechnic (RP). I hold a PhD in Economics from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Uppsala, Sweden. I am also an affiliate of CEGA Fellow at the University of California (UC), Berkeley- USA. My research interests span in Development Economics, Human Capital & Health, and Digital Services.

Over the last recent years, I have acquired relevant research and academic experience. I also have some years of experience in finance and human resources management. I currently coordinate the SA-TIED program's research and technical assistance activities with other UNU-WIDER colleagues.  

I have numerous co-authored works in progress, looking at the effects of public policies on local economic development. One of them is the impact of Local economic shock on education. The project examines how local economic shocks via agro-industrialization affect the education outcomes of children in low-income environments.  To this end, we leverage the rapid policy-induced expansion of coffee mills in Rwanda in the 2000s to estimate the effects of early life exposure to local economic shocks on students’ performance in the medium term. The study uses administrative data on test scores of the universe of primary school students sitting for a high-stake national exam between 2012-2019 and geocoded data on the location and timing of coffee mills establishment in Rwanda. Our identification strategy essentially exploits the staggered rollout of the coffee mills and the timing of the student's birth to measure the medium-term effect of early life exposure to the coffee mills on test scores in a difference-in-difference design. Overall, the paper's findings underscore the spillover effects of agro-industrialization, such as the adoption of coffee mills in local communities. More importantly, it highlights the need for developing countries that rely on raw commodity exports to invest in value-addition; this not only increases the value of their exports but has spillover effects on local economies.