Wildlife Conservation and Management in Kenya: Towards a Co-management Approach

The co-management approach of managing natural resources has increasingly become popular among conservationists and development practitioners since it overcomes the shortcomings of both the centralised management and community-based approaches that hinder harmonization of conflicting interests among diverse stakeholder groups. Considering criteria developed from theoretical advancements on co-management and drawing on empirical studies conducted in Kenya, the paper examines how successful the co-management approach has been in terms of meeting the needs and interests of local communities and conservationists. Further, it analyses some of the factors or conditions that contribute towards the emergence and subsequent adoption of the co-management approach in the conservation and management of wildlife. These factors, which may also be important in other developing countries, include the provision of a favourable policy framework, institutional capacity of organized user groups to co-manage wildlife resources, land tenure conditions and accessibility to wildlife resources. It is emphasised that the co-management approach has had, so far, mixed results and there are certain important factors challenging its successful implementation in Kenya.Kenya, Co-management, Wildlife management, Conditions for co-management, Sustainable management

A Project on Why Many High School and College Students Fail to Attend Church Services

The purpose of this research project is to establish why many of the high school and college students within the Light of Life Restoration Church in Kenya choose not to attend church services. Even after childhood training and church attendance since they were young, many students drop out of church. They get themselves involved in other activities and friends who eventually derail them to other attractions. This alarming trend has brought about the derailment from the Christian moral principles and values which have been the guiding principle of the nation. The derailment has caused lawlessness, unruliness, and all kinds of evils within the society. If pastoral counseling could be implemented in schools and colleges, the increased rise in church dropouts that has been causing other ills within the community would be reduced

Computing Opportunity Costs of Growing Local Varieties for On-farm Conservation: Illustrations Using Sorghum Data from Ethiopia

The recent shift of emphasis to on-farm conservation is driven by its diverse attractive features - participatory nature, dynamic nature, capacity to maintain not only crop diversity but the knowledge that evolves with it, the chance it offers and the challenge it brings to link conservation with farmers' livelihood. To make it operational, placing incentives and removal of perverse incentives are of critical importance. However, before placing sound incentives compatible to farmers' circumstances, the opportunity costs farmers face when using local varieties of public interest should be understood. This paper empirically examines farmers' opportunity costs of maintaining local varieties of sorghum using a household survey data collected from 198 sorghum growers in Eastern Ethiopia. Opportunity costs are generated using different homogeneous treatment statistical models and factors affecting them are further examined using switching regression model. The average opportunity costs suggest not only the size of policy incentive required for farmers to maintain local varieties of sorghum on-farm but also are useful to estimate the national costs of conserving crop genetic resources. The regression analysis shows that opportunity costs increase with access to output markets and extension, output price, access to input supply, experience in growing improved varieties, and relative importance of the crop. On the contrary, plot quality, input price and oxen ownership are reducing opportunity costs. The paper then concludes outlining the policy implications of the empirical findings to incentive design for on-farm conservation of crop genetic resources.Opportunity costs, incentive design, on-farm conservation, crop genetic resources, Ethiopia, Crop Production/Industries,

Does Participation in Microfinance Programs Improve Household Incomes: Empirical Evidence From Makueni District, Kenya

Although microfinance has elicited different reactions from different stakeholders, there seems to be a general agreement that it is useful in reducing poverty. This study is an attempt to contribute in to the debate on the impact of microfinance on household incomes. We use a pooled data set collected from the south western part of Makueni district in Kenya to study the households’ access to microfinance credit and how the credit affects their incomes. We control for household selection bias as well as endogenity problems in the sample. Cross sectional analysis fails to show any significant positive impact of microfinance on poverty reduction. Only after the inclusion of time dynamics in the study are we able to find a weak positive significance of microfinance on household incomes.household, incomes, Kenya, Makueni, Agricultural Finance, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Financial Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, Health Economics and Policy, Labor and Human Capital, Marketing, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Data for the evaluation of irrigation development interventions in Northern Ethiopia

This data article provides the datasets that are used in the holistic ex-ante impact evaluation of an irrigation dam construction project in Northern Ethiopia [1]. We used an expert knowledge elicitation approach as a means of acquiring the data. The data shared here captures all the parameters considered important in the impact pathway (i.e. the expected benefits, costs, and risks) of the decision to construct an irrigation dam. The dataset is disaggregated for two impact pathway models: one complementing the dam construction with catchment restoration and the other without catchment restoration. Both models are scripted in the R programming language. The data can be used to examine how the construction of an irrigation dam affects the incomes as well as the food and nutritional status of farmers that are affected by the intervention

Determinants for Use of Certified Maize Seed and the Relative Importance of Transaction Costs

The rising world prices for major tradable staples such as maize have been a concern for sub- Saharan countries such as Kenya which are maize deficit countries. Maize is a major staple food for over 80 percent of Kenya’s population. Kenya relies on maize for up to 40 percent of its dietary energy supply and is accordingly searching for ways to increase maize productivity. Maize productivity has been rising in the last decade manly as a result of the use of improved germplasm and fertilizer. However, the proportion of farmers using these technologies is low and the aggregate productivity in maize is low compared to other countries and its potential. Previous studies on input adoption have often assumed the existence of perfect supply and product markets, tending to ignore the important but significant role played by institutions as well as the role of transaction costs associated with market exchange. This study makes use of qualitative information from institutions and actors in seed input value chains as well as quantitative information collected from a sample of 150 farmers, in the Moist Transitional Maize Zones of Kenya. A two stage regression model was applied to analyze determinants of adoption and factors affecting degree of adoption of certified improved maize seed. The results show that as farmers adopt certified seeds, they incur higher transaction costs than non adopters, rural infrastructure, social capital such as membership in groups and trust play an important role in the decision of whether or not to use certified seed.Crop Production/Industries,

Assessing NGDOs’ Targeting Performance and Characteristics of Households Participating in Child Development Programmes in Rural Eastern Kenya

Targeting beneficiaries of development interventions in the context of poverty alleviation remains a challenge to most development agencies and policy-makers. Due to limited resources and the small scale of operations, most non governmental development organisations’ (NGDOs) practice targeting in order to limit themselves to interventions that only select a group of individuals considered to be most in need. This paper analyses the targeting performance of two child-safety net programmes operating in rural Kenya and examines the factors influencing it. In addition, an econometric model is developed to identify the characteristics of the households participating in these programmes. Data for this paper was collected through a household survey of 120 randomly selected households, stratified equally into participants and non-participants. The targeting performance of the studied NGDOs’ interventions was found to be poor due to reliance on local social structures that led to under-representation of the poorest group of households in programme activities. The paper further shows that although the case study NGDOs and their child programmes could be supporting households with characteristics that indicate that they are not among the well-off in the society, such households do not necessarily belong to the poorest group of community members in relative terms

Design of a four-phase switchmode high efficiency power supply

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-66).by John Mburu Gachora.M.Eng