Covid-19 is already having widespread consequences in Nairobi, Kenya including the loss of earnings and starvation. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there is considerable heterogeneity. For example, vendors who can still sell essential goods have been less impacted, while some others have completely lost their earnings. Women have fared disproportionately worse, with higher incidences of job…
Tracking the Value of Time of Informal Sector Workers during and Post-Curfew in Nairobi, Kenya
Project
Taming Counterfeits Markets with Consumer Information
Access to quality inputs is critical to boosting agricultural productivity. However, quantitative research (Tjernström et al 2017; Bold et al 2017; Ashour et al 2019) and news reports (Muchiri 2019; Okinda 2019) find that the quality of agricultural inputs—such as seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides–is often low in rural African markets. The inability of buyers to…
Gender Effects of COVID-19: Evidence from the Kenya Life Panel Survey
Governments in many countries are implementing social distancing measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19, yet there is limited evidence about the effectiveness of these measures in low-income contexts. This is particularly true of travel restrictions/lockdowns; this, plus school closures, are likely to have major labor market implications, and potentially differential effects by gender. The…
Impacts of Microfranchising on Young Women’s Occupational Choices
Youth underemployment is a major challenge facing developing nations, particularly in Africa (Filmer and Fox 2014). Young people are more likely to be unemployed than older adults (Kluve et al. 2016). In low-income countries, unemployment figures also typically underestimate the proportion of youths who cannot find productive jobs (Fares et al. 2006). After leaving school,…
Start-Up Capital for Youth
Unemployment among young people is one of the most pressing social and economic problems facing less developed countries today. Data from the 2005 Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey found that approximately 21% of youths are unemployed, and a further 25% are neither in school nor working. While the traditional academic schooling track offers large labour…
Girls Empowered by Microfranchising
Integrating young adults into the formal labour market is a major challenge facing developing nations, particularly in Africa (World Bank 2007). High levels of unemployment, especially among youth, have led many policymakers to advocate microfinance (cf Yunus 1999) and other forms of credit market expansion aimed at promoting entrepreneurship. However, empirical evidence on the overall…
Modelling Labour Markets in LICs with Imperfect Data
Despite the centrality of the labour market to the questions of poverty and inequality, African labour markets are not well understood and significant research gaps exist. These gaps have important implications: they weaken the ability of governments to design and implement effective policies and hamper the monitoring of change and the measurement of impact. Within…