My research aims to investigate and explain why liberalisation of commodity sectors across Africa has produced unevenness in the structure of regulations and the capacity of local organisations in the sector to upgrade as well as capture value. We investigate the question through a historical comparative approach between Uganda's and Kenya's coffee sector.

• Supported different research projects led by senior academic members of the department with data cleaning and analysis. • Prepare and gave lectures in economic demography, applied statistics, and econometrics to undergraduate classes. • Engaged in departmental research grant funding writing and participated in regular research seminars.

• Designed and implemented a robust procurement and operational strategy to strengthen the coffee sourcing network for the company as well as enhance operation efficiency and boost coffee exports. The strategy resulted in near doubling of coffee exports from 180,000 60-kg bags per year to 300,000 bags within one year. • Developed innovative approaches to business that generated revenue streams totalling to US$200,000 within one year. • Developed a robust stock management system that provided real-time evaluation of the Company’s P&L position. • Established a research department, that never was before, to collect real time market data on coffee availability, pricing, and structure of competition, which enhanced evidence-based decision making by top management. • Created mechanisms to engage and manage relations with our coffee suppliers, which enhanced our capacity to accurately predict availability of coffee supply during the marketing season. • Restructured department functions and properly aligned department functions to human resource needs and company spending on labour. • Assessed the company staffing capacity and subsequently proposed a robust and effective retooling and recruitment process to boost staff capacity to realise the ambitious operational strategy. • Established and managed off-factory sites teams at contracted third party processors, which boosted company coffee processing and export output. • Redesigned the company staff management system by incorporating practices, such as the daily huddle, to ensure clarification of tasks and fostering of intra-and inter-department cooperation. • Designed an effective trading strategy to appropriately set the right hedge positions to minimise losses and achieve greater profit performance for the business. • Developed a pipeline of collaborative projects with partners, such as Nestle, and Mastercard that generated projects grant funding totalling to US$ 2,000,000.

• Oversaw the design and implementation of farmer groups to minimise pitfalls of group dynamics, such as leaders’ predatory behaviour, and maximise collective action in formed reduced transaction costs for service delivery. • Wrote grants proposals that raised financing totalling to US$1,000,000 to establish a functioning organisational structure to deliver input financing to smallholder farmers in various coffee growing regions of Uganda. • Assessed eligible coffee farmers and subsequently oversaw the disbursement of fertiliser and cash advances totalling to US$ 3,000,000. • Supervised teams to effectively ensure recovery of disbursed credit that annually resulted in 90-95% repayment rate. • Implemented monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems that generated information that was crucially in testing and adapting our credit scoring index. • Developed context-suited procurement systems to facilitate maximisation of coffee supplies and purchases within the farmer organisation network.

Contributed to development of employment, education, and entrepreneurship workstream.Wrote a section on entrepreneurship and firm growth in Uganda. Authored a paper that examine the nexus between weakening of civil society organisation and political party consolidation in Uganda.

Developed criteria that guided the review and preparation of the Financial Year 2014/15 Uganda Public Investment Plan (PIP); carried out review of Uganda’s public investment plan for the FY2014/15 and delivered an internal report on the status of government’s public investment portfolio with specific recommendations on performing and non-performing projects; prepared a chapter on sector performance analysis of the Uganda’s background to the Budget Paper for FY2014/15 that partly informed the preparation of the budget speech for the FY2014/15; and prepared policy briefs for top Technical Team of the Ministry of Finance relating to improvement of Uganda Public Investment Programme.