Publications
Sustainable maize intensification through site-specific nutrient management advice: Experimental evidence from Nigeria KU Leuven
There is growing evidence on the impacts of site-specific nutrient management (SSNM) from Asia. The evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where SSNM developments are more recent and where conditions concerning soil fertility and fertilizer use differ importantly from those in Asia, is extremely scarce. We evaluate a SSNM advisory tool that allows extension agents to generate fertilizer recommendations tailored to the specific situation of an ...
Voluntary sustainability standards and farmer welfare: The pathways to success? KU Leuven
Whether Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) - such as Fairtrade, GlobalGAP or Organic - may contribute to economic sustainability has been subject to vigorous debate over the past decades. To analyze the welfare effects of VSS for family farms, previous studies rely on single equation models which enable analyzing if (some) VSS affect welfare, but not how (some) VSS affect welfare – or not. Hence, little is known about the mechanisms and ...
Small Family, Happy Family? Fertility Preferences and the Quantity–Quality Trade-Off in Sub-Saharan Africa KU Leuven
To design family planning policies in Sub-Saharan Africa that are based on reproductive empowerment instead of reproductive control, knowledge on fertility preferences and trade-offs between the number of children and child-raising quality is key. This study is the first to empirically investigate fertility decisions and the quantity–quality trade-off theory from a preferences perspective. For this purpose, we use a novel discrete choice ...
Rice availability and stability in Africa under future socio-economic development and climatic change KU Leuven
As Africa is facing multiple challenges related to food security, frameworks integrating production and availability are urgent for policymaking. Attention should be given not only to gradual socio-economic and climatic changes but also to their temporal variability. Here we present an integrated framework that allows one to assess the impacts of socio-economic development, gradual climate change and climate anomalies. We apply this framework to ...
Fuel for food: Access to clean cooking fuel and food security in India KU Leuven
While the health and environmental impacts of using biomass fuels for cooking are well-established in the literature, there is little empirical evidence on the impacts of such dirty cooking fuels on household food security. In this paper, we assess the impact of using biomass fuels on the daily number of meals consumed in India using a household-level panel covering six districts over the period (2015–2018). We apply Poisson fixed effects models ...
Gendered fertility intentions and child schooling: insights on the quantity–quality trade-off from Ethiopia KU Leuven University of Antwerp
Fertility decline in human history is a complex enigma. Different triggers have been proposed, among others the increased demand for human capital resulting in parents making a quantity-quality (QQ) trade-off. This is the first study that examines the existence of a QQ trade-off and the possible gender bias by analysing fertility intentions rather than fertility outcomes. We rely on the unified growth theory to understand the QQ trade-off ...