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Sustainable Economic Development

Articles overview

  • The Potential of Landscape Approaches for Addressing Child Labour in the Cocoa Sector 

    • Institute
    • Publication

    This synthesis of six case studies studies the impact of the “landscape approach” and offers recommendations for its design and setup, as this approach – in theory – has the potential to support effective and sustainable action to prevent and address child labour. Based on an operational definition of a “landscape approach” – an approach […]

  • How gender norms impact women’s role in forest use and forest management—illustrations from Ethiopia’s Bale Ecoregion

    • Institute
    • Publication

    This paper unravels the gender relations in rural forest-dependent communities in Ethiopia by taking a closer look at the country’s Bale Ecoregion, located in the Oromia regional state. Drawing on primary quantitative and qualitative data, the paper explores women’s roles as users of forest resources and in forest resource management, before reflecting on the construction […]

  • Tanik Joshipura

    • Institute
    • Employee

    Tanik Joshipura is an economist specializing in long-run comparative economic development and food security. His PhD at Wageningen University and Research involved a cliometric inquiry into the origins and drivers of food import-dependence in sub-Saharan Africa. He has more than two years of fieldwork experience, and has previously worked in SME development, non-profit management and […]

  • Nestlé Income Accelerator Program: Progress Report of the Test-at-Scale Phase

    • Institute
    • Publication

    In 2022, Nestlé launched the Income Accelerator Program in Côte d’Ivoire as part of their ambition to help close the Living Income (LI) gap in their cocoa supply chain and combat the root causes of child labour risks. The current test-at-scale phase involves 10,000 farming households in Côte d’Ivoire, following a previous one-year piloting period among 1,000 farming households. These […]

  • Cocoa Household Income Study (CHIS) Methodology

    • Institute
    • Publication

    The cocoa sector has been working to deliver living incomes for cocoa farming households since 2015, but learning at the sector level aimed at achieving living incomes has been hampered by challenges in data collection and sharing. To address these challenges and to inform policy and strategy design and delivery with a focus on impact […]

  • End of Term Review of the Mobilising More for Climate programme (MoMo4C)

    • Institute
    • Project

    KIT conducted the end of-term Review (ETR) of the five-year MoMo4C programme which used a landscape approach to mobilise funding for projects implementing Bankable Nature Solutions to tackle climate change. Programme background WWF Netherlands, IUCN and Tropenbos are working together to address the financial gap in tackling climate change. Some countries, hit hardest by the […]

  • Vulnerability and resilience among farmers and market actors in local agri-food value chains in the face of COVID-19 disruptions: findings from Uganda and Kenya

    • Institute
    • Publication

    Countries which imposed strict containment measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are thought to have faced particular socio-economic challenges. This study assesses the implications of COVID-19 disruptions on local agri-food value chain actors in Kenya and Uganda, as both countries enacted strict lockdowns to limit the spread of the virus.  Using survey data from […]

  • Contested representations: A comparative analysis of palm oil sustainability in Malaysian and Dutch media

    • Institute
    • Publication

    The emergence of palm oil as the world’s most produced and consumed vegetable oil has prompted various policy initiatives to help govern the industry in a sustainable manner. These initiatives include transnational sustainable certification schemes, such as the Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), and national level sustainability standards, such as Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil. […]

  • Navigating competing demands in monitoring and evaluation: Five key paradoxes

    • Institute
    • Publication

    Evaluation in complex programs assembling multiple actors and combining various interventions faces contradictory requirements. In this article, we take a management perspective to show how to recognize and accommodate these contradictory elements as paradoxes. Through reflective practice we identify five paradoxes, each consisting of two contradicting logics: the paradox of purpose—between accountability and learning; the […]

  • Living Income and Child Labour in the Cocoa Sector of Côte d’Ivoire

    • Institute
    • Publication

    KIT Working Paper Child labour remains a persistent human rights violation in international commodity supply chains, adversely impacting children’s physical and mental health and depriving them of educational opportunities (UNICEF, 2020). This holds true for the cocoa sector in Côte d’Ivoire; a country that produces 43% of all cocoa worldwide (ICCO, 2022). A nationwide study […]

  • Towards more effective ways to address child labour in the cocoa sector

    • Institute
    • Project

    Child labour remains a persistent human rights violation in the cocoa sector, impacting children’s physical and mental health while depriving them of educational opportunities. The cocoa sector is increasingly responding to this issue by implementing innovative programmes, targeting the root causes of child labour, such as poverty and a lack of access to quality education. […]

  • Evaluation of the Initiative for Sustainable Landscapes (ISLA) programme

    • Institute
    • Project

    In september 2023, KIT completed a mid-term evaluation of the Initiative for Sustainable Landscapes, an international land use management programme of the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH), financed by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The evaluation assesses whether ISLA is on track to reach its goals, and provides recommendations for the second half of the programme. […]