ILRI Staff:
Andew Mude – Scientist, IBLI Project Leader
A Kenyan national, Dr. Andrew Mude pursued his undergraduate degree in Gettysburg College, Pennslyvania. In 1999, he graduated summa cum laude with a major in Economics and a minor in Mathematics and French. In 2000, Dr. Mude joined Cornell University in New York in pursuit of his doctoral degree in Economics with a concentration in development economics and applied econometrics. He graduated with his PhD in June, 2006. As part of his dissertation research, Dr. Mude spent six-months in the field studying coffee producers and their cooperatives in Murang’a district Kenya. For this effort he won the silver medal at the 2007 Global Development Network. Upon completion of is doctoral degree in Economics from Cornell University, Dr. Mude joined ILRI in August 2006 as an Economist at ILRIs Targeting and Innovations Program.
Brenda Wandera – IBLI Project Development Manager
Brenda joined the team in December 2009 to support the Marsabit pilot project implementation and management, and the scaling up of IBLI activities in other areas. Prior to joining ILRI, Brenda worked as an environmental and social-economic impact assessment consultant as well as a part-time lecturer for Moi University’s School of Business and Economics, Nairobi Campus. Brenda brings on board the IBLI team agricultural insurance experience having worked with Blue Shield Insurance Company as an Agricultural Insurance Officer. She holds a BSc. in Agricultural Economics from Egerton University, Kenya and an MBA specializing in Marketing from the University of Nairobi.
Munenobu Ikegami – Post Doctoral Scientist
Nobu is a Post-Doctoral Scientist (Economist) for Poverty and Gender Programme. His work focuses on the design and evaluation of index-based livestock insurance in Northern Kenya and drought insurance in East Africa. Prior to joining ILRI in 2008, he was a PhD student and research assistant at Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
Samuel Mburu – Research Officer
Samuel joined the IBLI team in September 2011 to support the IBLI research agenda; survey instruments, implementation strategy, data collection and analysis. He holds a Masters in Agricultural and Applied Economics from University of Nairobi and Bachelors degree in Agricultural Economics from Egerton University. He was previously working as a Research Technician with Poverty and Gender Team within ILRI.Prior to Joining ILRI he worked with Tegemeo Institute of Egerton University as a Research Assistant. He has a wide experience in design and execution of research projects, management of massive rural and urban household panel data and data analysis. Recent work includes gender and livestock studies focusing on markets, incomes and implications for food security in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique
Oscar Naibei – Research Technician
Oscar joined the IBLI team in 2009 as Research Technician-Data management. Prior to joining IBLI, he worked with the data management and analysis team in the Sustainable Livestock Futures Project for a period of three years. He is a Multi Media university graduate in Management Information Systems and is currently undertaking Bachelor of Science in IT at the Jomo
Kenyatta University. Oscar is part of the data management team for IBLI.
Mohamed Shibia – Field Research Supervisor
Shibia joined ILRI in the year 2009 as the Field Research Supervisor. Prior to Joining ILRI, he worked with National Arid lands Research Centre of Kenya Agricultural Research Institute as a Research Scientist. Shibia has also undertaken short courses in participatory research appraisals as well as environmental and social impact assessments. He has over 5 years of research experience with pastoralists in northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. Shibia holds an Msc. in Natural Resources Management (Human Ecology) from the Egerton University and a Bsc. in Wildlife Management from Moi University
Research Team:
Chris Barrett is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management and International Professor of Agriculture at Cornell University where he also serves as the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future’s Associate Director for Economic Development Programs and the Director of the Cornell Institute for International Food, Agriculture and Development’s initiative on Stimulating Agricultural and Rural Transformation. He holds degrees from Princeton (A.B. 1984), Oxford (M.S. 1985) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (dual Ph.D. 1994). At Cornell, he teaches undergraduate courses on Contemporary Controversies in the Global Economy and Comparative Perspective on Poverty Reduction Policy, as well as graduate courses on the Microeconomics of International Development, Food Systems and Poverty Reduction, and Food Security. Professor Barrett has published or in press 10 books and more than 200 journal articles and book chapters. He has been principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on more than $21 million in extramural research grants from the National Science Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Rockefeller Foundation, USAID and other sponsors. He has supervised more than 50 graduate students and post-docs, many of whom are now on leading faculties and in research institutes worldwide. He served as editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics from 2003-2008, is presently as an associate editor or editorial board member of the African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, the Egerton (Kenya) Journal of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, the Journal of African Economies, the Journal of Development Studies and World Development, and was previously President of the Association of Christian Economists. He has served on a variety of boards and has won several university, national and international awards for teaching, research and public outreach.
Michael R. Carter – Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California-Davis
Michael Carter is professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California-Davis. He directs the newly established Index Insurance Innovation Initiative (I4) which seeks to design, implement and test a new generation of livelihood-optimized index insurance contracts. He is also director of the USAID-funded BASIS Assets and Market Access Collaborative Research Support Program that studies rural poverty alleviation strategies in Africa, Asia and Latin American. He is one of the world’s leading experts on rural financial markets and has made fundamental theoretical and empirical contributions on the functioning of rural financial markets and how they shape poverty transitions in low income economies. He drafted the rural finance chapter for the 2008 World Development Report on agriculture. Along with his close involvement with the Kenyan Index-Based Livestock Insurance project, his other current projects include an agricultural index insurance project in Peru that involves local insurance companies, international reinsurance and retail delivery by a Peruvian microfinance institution. He is also involved with the design of agricultural index insurance contracts in China, Mali and Paraguay, working with partners ranging from the WFP to the Aga Khan Foundation and the French NGO PlaNet Finance.
John McPeak – Associate Professor of Public Administration, Syracuse University
John McPeak is currently an associate professor in the Department of Public Administration in the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Prior to graduate school, he served for three years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal. He then entered the graduate program in agricultural economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his master’s and PhD from this program, conducting field work in northern Kenya that served as the basis for his dissertation. After receiving his doctorate, he took a post doctoral research associate position with Cornell University assigned to work in Kenya with the USAID / GL-CRSP funded Pastoral Risk Management Project. After three years of field work with this project he joined the faculty of Syracuse University in 2002. He teaches microeconomics and development economics at the graduate level. He has continued to conduct research in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Mali largely focused on livestock production, marketing, and livestock crop interactions. He is a citizen of the United States.
Sommarat Chantarat - Australian National University
Pin is a faculty member at the Crawford school of Economics and Government, the Australian National University. Her research interests span the issues of both demand and supply side of weather risk management instruments in developing countries, finance for development and environmental and natural resource conservation. Her current research projects focus on (i) pilot and evaluation of index-based livestock insurance in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, (ii) systematic structures of weather risks and the impacts of climate change on viability of weather risk market in China, (iii) weather insurance and credit access among rice and maize farmers in Thailand and (iv) securitization of famine risk and the competitiveness of famine-indexed derivatives as philanthropy and social investment ventures. Pin was a postdoctoral associate at Cornell university and ILRI during 2009-10. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at Cornell in August 2009. In the fall and summer 2008, she joined ILRI as a graduate fellow and led the fieldwork that studied optimal insurance contract designs and the willingness to pay for index based livestock insurance among pastoralists in Marsabit. Pin also holds an M. Phil. in Economics from the University of Cambridge and an M.Sc. in Financial Mathematics from the University of Chicago.
