Triple Helix as a Strategic Tool to Fast-Track Climate Change Adaptation in Rural Kenya: Case Study of Marsabit County

AbstractThe lack of affordable, clean, and reliable energy in Africa's rural areas forces people to resort to poor quality energy source, which is detrimental to the people's health and prevents the economic development of communities. Moreover, access to safe water and food security are concerns closely linked to health issues and children malnourishment. Recent climate change due to global warming has worsened the already critical situation.Electricity is well known to be an enabler of development as it allows the use of modern devices thus enabling the development of not only income-generating activities but also water pumping and food processing and conservation that can promote socioeconomic growth. However, all of this is difficult to achieve due to the lack of investors, local skills, awareness by the community, and often also government regulations.All the above mentioned barriers to the uptake of electricity in rural Kenya could be solved by the coordinated effort of government, private sector, and academia, also referred to as Triple Helix, in which each entity may partially take the other's role. This chapter discretizes the above and shows how a specific county (Marsabit) has benefited from this triple intervention. Existing government policies and actions and programs led by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international agencies are reviewed, highlighting the current interconnection and gaps in promoting integrated actions toward climate change adaptation and energy access

Bridging gender gaps through innovations in agricultural value chains in Africa

This paper examines innovations for bridging gender gaps in agricultural value chains in Africa. It focuses on innovative platforms for addressing gender gaps, considering women contribute up to 40 percent of labor in agricultural production. Women remain at the bottom of value chains and face gender-specific constraints attributable to gender and social norms, discriminatory beliefs and practices, gender-blind designs and delivery of technologies and innovations which impede women s participation in value chains. Consequently, women are unable to adjust to challenges and opportunities of technological progress, commercial orientation, and global integration. This paper suggests that gender-sensitive technological and institutional innovations is essential to promote women s participation in agricultural value chains and bridge the gender gap while upholding gender-specific outcomes. The study shows that women rely on alternative institutional innovations and arrangements such as group-based approaches in order to improve their participation in value chains which implies the call for policies that nurture and strengthen these kinds of institutions. Integrating research, designing value chain interventions and monitoring and evaluation with a gender lens is essential in order to accelerate women s participation in value chain development programmes, while allowing them to be role models and spearhead their own empowerment. Acknowledgement : We acknowledge the financial support from the Center for Development Research under PARI projec

Drivers of cooking energy choices by meal-types among smallholder farmers in western Kenya

There are gaps in research needed to enhance policy intervention for rural households’ transitions from traditional biomass to cleaner energy sources. This paper reports on a survey among farmers in western Kenya to assess drivers of cooking energy choices for various key meals; to understand agricultural production factors in cooking energy choices; and to assess energy use homogeneity among varied sub-counties. The study sampled 388 respondents from four heterogeneous rural sub-counties differing in altitude, proximity to public forests, and cultural characteristics. The multinomial logit model analysis showed that significant factors influencing the shift from firewood to LPG for breakfast preparation included access to credit, income, formal employment, and the proportion of adults in the household. Shifting from firewood to crop wastes was significant, influenced by distance covered to collect firewood, and desire for warming houses. The shift from firewood to sticks was influenced by firewood cost, houses owned, and reliance on own farm for woodfuel. Determinants of cooking energy choices for breakfast, lunch and supper were identical. Sticks were seen as an inferior cooking energy source. The adoption of cleaner energy was more associated with breakfast than other meals. Despite the sub-counties’ heterogeneity, no substantial differences were observed among them on drivers of cooking energy choices. Study outcomes were consistent with other concepts associated with cooking energy usage, including the transition energy ladder and energy stacking