I am currently a Senior Research Fellow in the Innovation Policy and Scaling Unit at the International Food Policy Research Institute and an Associate Research Fellow at LICOS Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance of the KULeuven, Belgium.

I am an applied development economist working on smallholder agriculture in East Africa, with most of my fieldwork in Uganda. My research uses randomized controlled trials, lab-in-field experiments, and structural and time-series methods to ask how poor rural households make decisions — about adopting new technologies, sharing common-pool resources, bargaining within the household, and engaging with markets — and how policy can shift those decisions. Substantively, the work clusters around four themes: (i) digital agricultural extension, including video-mediated extension, IVR, and community knowledge workers; (ii) gender in agrifood systems, from buyer-side discrimination and customer perceptions to role-model interventions and intrahousehold cooperation; (iii) value chain upgrading, with a focus on Ugandan dairy and seed systems; and (iv) the political economy of public service delivery and accountability. Earlier work covered sovereign debt relief and fiscal response in HIPC countries, and the historical integration of European and Tanzanian grain markets — methodological threads (price dynamics, transaction costs, panel VARs) that still surface in current value-chain work.

I hold a PhD in Economics from KU Leuven, and my research has been published in journals such as World Development, Economic Development and Cultural Change, and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. I also engage actively in policy discussions through blogs, discussion papers, and stakeholder forums. I am currently an editor of the European Journal of Development Research.

You can download my CV here.