African start-up industry mapping: Status quo and emerging trends in agriculture and digitalization
African start-ups are quickly becoming crucial to achieving socio-economic development to transcend the prevailing sustainable development challenges. Thus, there is an urgent need for innovative solutions to leapfrog development in [...]
Towards a Framework for Community Based Participatory Research: A Pilot in Mathare, Nairobi-Kenya
This project aims to co-create an inclusive framework and partnership for engaging communities in community-based participatory research (CBPR), particularly vulnerable groups and people living in informal settlements. According to the [...]
Electric Cooking in Urban Informal Settlements
Campaigns for adoption of cooking with electricity have mainly focused on high- and middle-income households. The realization that low-income households also need to be targeted in the transition to clean [...]
Kenya National Electric Cooking Strategy (KNeCS)
The transition to modern and clean cooking has been a global agenda, with different countries setting their targets for achieving the same. Kenya aims to achieve its clean cooking targets [...]
Energy Transitions in Informal Settlements in Kenya: A Political Economy Analysis
Informal settlements, which already face severe developmental challenges, are particularly vulnerable to impacts of climate change. Challenges of accessing reliable, affordable, and clean energy particularly exacerbate vulnerabilities that hamper resilience. [...]
Digital platforms and household resilience in Mathare, Nairobi.
This is an empirical research project that examines in what ways access and use of digital platforms varies between and within households in a large informal settlement in Nairobi, and how this may influence the capacity of households to cope with shocks and disturbances.
Multi-purpose community centre for learning and social cohesion in Dandora
This is a community resilience initiative to help children, youth and the larger Dandora community to cope with the disproportionate impacts of COVID19 (measures) on the social and economic well-being [...]
Community Resilience Pathways in Nairobi’s informal settlements
This research project explores and compares the evolutionary processes through which two large informal settlements in Nairobi became more resilient to shocks and disturbances: what pathways did they follow and [...]
Sustainability, Inclusivity and Governance of Mini-grids in Africa (SIGMA)
Although off-grid and decentralised solutions are expected to play a significant role and mini-grids are assumed to be a game changer for a rapid, cost-effective, pro-poor, universal electrification globally, the [...]
Integration of centralized and decentralized energy systems in Kenya: a political economy analysis
In sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya is considered one of the frontier countries in developing long-term electricity planning, locally known as Least Cost Power Development Plans (LCPDP). The LCPDP process, in the now [...]
Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS)
Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS) is a five-year programme funded by UK Aid (DFID) which aims to spark a revolution through rapidly accelerating the transition from biomass to clean cooking […]
Creative Cities are Safer Cities – Rethinking urban safety from a creative and frugal perspective.
The "Creative Cities are Safer Cities" initiative seeks to relate and contribute to the goals of the UN Safer Cities Programme, particularly through models that integrate community ownership and management. [...]
Frugal Innovation Histories
This is a broadly scoped empirical study to understand how new ‘frugal’ innovations are developed bottom-up, and how frugality drives the product development process and the market creation process.