Mercy Wanjiku Kamau is a senior research fellow at Tegemeo Institute of Agricultural Policy and Development, based in Egerton University, Kenya. She is also the Director for the Institute’s Measurement, Learning, and Evaluation (MLE) Unit, which provides premier evaluation services in the agriculture, food, and rural sectors. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Development Economics Group of Wageningen University, in the Netherlands, and a master’s degree in agricultural economics and a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from University of Nairobi, Kenya.
Mercy has over 20 years of professional experience in socio-economic and policy research in the agricultural and rural sectors. In addition, she is an ardent advocate for rigorous impact evaluation in the agriculture sector and was the founding director of Tegemeo Institute’s MLE Unit. She has been a Principal Investigator (PI) and coordinator in several studies. Currently, she is the PI in the ALL-IN project in which she is assessing the impact of digital agro-weather advisories among farming communities in Kenya. Her recent works include research on farmers’ willingness to pay for agro-weather advisories, the political economy of Kenya’s agricultural transformation, and economic and policy issues related to fertilizer and soil health. Previously, she also led the study on the impact of certification programmes for smallholder coffee farmers, the baseline studies for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the evaluation of the Great Lakes Cassava Initiative (GLCI) project in Tanzania and Rwanda, and the 3ie/AGRA-funded impact evaluation of seed promotion campaigns in Uganda.
At the beginning of her career, Mercy undertook an economic analysis at the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation (KALRO, formerly KARI), assessing the adoption and impact (ex-ante and ex-post) of national research programmes. She also carried out marketing and value chain studies for selected staples, fruits, and vegetables in United Republic of Tanzania (including Zanzibar) and Uganda.
