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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

researcher spotlight

Kate Ambler

Kate Amber is a Senior Research Fellow in the Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit. Kate’s research broadly focuses on interventions that can increase incomes for smallholders and other microenterprises in agrifood value chains, with a specific focus on the inclusion of women. This includes work on programming in fragile settings, innovations in agricultural finance, and regulatory solutions for food safety. 

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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experts

Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion

Kalle Hirvonen

Senior Research Fellow

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Bio

Kalle Hirvonen is a Senior Research Fellow in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit. ​Through his research, Kalle seeks to understand how to sustainably improve nutrition and food security outcomes in low-income countries. Thematically, this work sits at the intersection of development, health, and agricultural economics. Kalle has done extensive research in areas of social protection, agriculture-nutrition linkages, food systems, value chains, and food markets. Most of his work is based on statistical analyses of primary data from large-scale household surveys or randomized controlled trials. Kalle holds a PhD in Economics and a master’s degrees in Development Economics from the University of Sussex, UK, as well as a master’s degree in International Economics from the University of Helsinki.

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Publications

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Brief

Building pathways out of poverty in Baidoa: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial at endline

2024Leight, Jessica; Karachiwalla, Naureen; Hirvonen, Kalle; Rakshit, Deboleena
Details

Building pathways out of poverty in Baidoa: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial at endline

Somalia is one of the poorest countries in the world, and severe poverty, ongoing armed conflict, and recurring droughts and floods have created a humanitarian crisis characterized by a high level of inter nal displacement. Baidoa city—the site of this evaluation—hosts 517 sites for internally displaced per sons (IDP), with almost 600,000 households, and 64 percent of the individuals living in these sites are women and girls. According to the second Somali High Frequency Survey (Pape and Karamba 2019), IDP settlements (along with rural areas) face a particularly high level of poverty, exacerbated by high unemployment rates and the absence of income-generating opportunities. This brief reports on endline findings from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluating the project Building Pathways Out of Poverty for Ultra-poor IDPs and Vulnerable Host Communities in Baidoa, an ultra-poor graduation (UPG) intervention implemented by World Vision and funded by the United States Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA). The project seeks to enable ultra-poor internally displaced households to graduate from extreme poverty and begin the upward trajectory to self-reliance for displacement-affected communities by enabling gender-sensitive, context-appropriate, and sustainable livelihoods in an urban setting. IFPRI is collaborating with World Vision to conduct the trial.

Year published

2024

Authors

Leight, Jessica; Karachiwalla, Naureen; Hirvonen, Kalle; Rakshit, Deboleena

Citation

Leight, Jessica; Karachiwalla, Naureen; Hirvonen, Kalle; and Rakshit, Deboleena. 2024. Building pathways out of poverty in Baidoa: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial at endline. Learning Brief December 2024. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/168400

Country/Region

Somalia

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Poverty; Conflicts; Natural Disasters; Displacement; Women; Unemployment; Gender

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Project

Fragility, Conflict, and Migration

Record type

Brief

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Blog Post

Graduation from poverty: Can a big push program help conflict-affected households? Evidence from Somalia

2024Hirvonen, Kalle; Karachiwalla, Naureen; Leight, Jessica; Rakshit, Deboleena
Details

Graduation from poverty: Can a big push program help conflict-affected households? Evidence from Somalia

We are living in one of the most violent periods since the end of the Cold War. Of the 59 active conflicts worldwide, nearly half (28) are unfolding in Africa. Among these, Somalia stands out as a country enduring one of the continent’s longest-running conflicts, stretching back to the 1980s. Nearly 4 million people out of Somalia’s population of 18 million have been forced to flee their homes due to persistent violence and increasingly unstable climate conditions. Many of these internally displaced persons (IDPs) have sought refuge in unplanned, informal settlements in urban areas.

Year published

2024

Authors

Hirvonen, Kalle; Karachiwalla, Naureen; Leight, Jessica; Rakshit, Deboleena

Citation

Hirvonen, Kalle; Karachiwalla, Naureen; Leight, Jessica; and Rakshit, Deboleena. 2024. Graduation from poverty: Can a big push program help conflict-affected households? Evidence from Somalia. IFPRI Blog. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://www.ifpri.org/blog/graduation-from-poverty-can-a-big-push-program-help-conflict-affected-households-evidence-from-somalia/

Country/Region

Somalia

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Poverty; Conflicts; Displacement; Climate; Food Security

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Project

Fragility, Conflict, and Migration

Record type

Blog Post

Resource thumbnail

Brief

Can social assistance reduce violent conflict and civil unrest? Evidence from a large-scale public works program in Ethiopia

2024Hirvonen, Kalle; Machado, Elia; Simons, Andrew M.
Details

Can social assistance reduce violent conflict and civil unrest? Evidence from a large-scale public works program in Ethiopia

Violent conflict and political instability are escalating worldwide, with Africa experiencing some of the most severe challenges. The region, home to 60% of the world’s poor (World Bank 2023), saw statebased armed conflict events nearly triple between 2007 and 2023 (Rustad 2024), while protests more than quadrupled from 2007 to 2019 (OECD 2021). Over this period, poverty reduction in Africa has been particularly sluggish in fragile and conflict-affected areas (Beegle et al. 2018a), likely due to the substantial economic losses associated with violent conflict and civil unrest.

Year published

2024

Authors

Hirvonen, Kalle; Machado, Elia; Simons, Andrew M.

Citation

Hirvonen, Kalle; Machado, Elia; and Simons, Andrew M. 2024. Can social assistance reduce violent conflict and civil unrest? Evidence from a large-scale public works program in Ethiopia. CGIAR Initiative on Fragility, Conflict, and Migration. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/163420

Country/Region

Ethiopia

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Conflicts; Public Works; Risk Assessment; Violence

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Project

Fragility, Conflict, and Migration

Record type

Brief

Blogs

Graduation from poverty: Can a big push program help conflict-affected households? Evidence from Somalia
IFPRI Blog
 | 
December 17, 2024

Graduation from poverty: Can a big push program help conflict-affected households? Evidence from Somalia

By Kalle Hirvonen, Naureen Karachiwalla, Jessica Leight, and Deboleena Rakshit

Moving from assistance to self-sufficiency.

Do ultra-poor graduation programs build resilience against droughts? Evidence from rural Ethiopia
IFPRI Blog
 | 
March 04, 2024

Do ultra-poor graduation programs build resilience against droughts? Evidence from rural Ethiopia

By Kalle Hirvonen, Daniel Gilligan, Jessica Leight, Heleene Tambet, and Victor Villa

Safety nets can buttress households against climate shocks.

Can phone surveys be used in standard poverty measurement? Evidence from Ethiopia
IFPRI Blog
 | 
June 09, 2023

Can phone surveys be used in standard poverty measurement? Evidence from Ethiopia

By Alan de Brauw, Kalle Hirvonen, Gashaw T. Abate, and Abdulazize Wolle

An experiment suggests survey fatigue can skew results.

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Events

Improving Diets and Nutrition through Food Systems: What Will it Take? A Dialogue on IFPRI’s 2024 Global Food Policy Report
Series/Special Event

 | 

November 6, 2024, 1:00 – 5:00 pm

Improving Diets and Nutrition through Food Systems: What Will it Take? A Dialogue on IFPRI’s 2024 Global Food Policy Report

IFPRI’s 2024 Global Food Policy flagship publication arrives at a pivotal moment, as the importance of addressing food systems for better nutrition continues to gain global recognition. With United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 29th Conference of the Parties taking place in November, the SUN Global Gathering on the horizon and the Nutrition […]

SPIR II Learning Event
IFPRI Program/Country Event

 | 

May 16 to 17, 2023

SPIR II Learning Event

May 16 and 17, 2023 (9:00am – 5:00pm Addis Ababa): The Strengthen PSNP5 Institutions and Resilience (SPIR II) Resilience Food Security Activity (RFSA) in Ethiopia is a five-year project (2021-2026) that supports implementation of the fifth phase of the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP5) in Amhara and Oromia regions and provides additional graduation model programming through complementary gender-sensitive livelihood, nutrition, and climate resilience activities to strengthen the program and expand its impacts.

Rethinking Food Crisis Responses
Series/Special Event

 | 

May 11, 2023, 5:00 – 8:45 am

Rethinking Food Crisis Responses

Virtual Event: May 11, 2023 – 5:00 AM to 8:45 AM EDT. Please join the Nigeria presentation of the Report and the launch of the FCM Initiative on May 11 in Abuja, Nigeria, in person or virtually.

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News

May 30, 2021 | In the News

Evidence from 22 African countries shows low trust in authorities is affecting vaccine uptake )The Print)

The Print published an op-ed by Senior research fellow Kalle Hirvonen and his co-authors that states while immunization saves millions of lives each year, progress in vaccine coverage remains highly uneven, both between and within countries. Despite considerable progress over the past two decades, the situation is particularly worrying in Africa. Nearly half of the world’s unvaccinated and under-vaccinated children […]

November 13, 2020 | In the News

The height of the Chinese is the highest in East Asia, so who is at the bottom? (The Paper)

The Paper (China) published an article that referenced the IFPRI research on stunting in children, Evaluation of linear growth at higher altitudes (Jama Pediatrics). The study analyzed the height and age data of more than 950,000 children from 59 countries and showed that the growth rate of children living in an ideal family environment is the same as that of […]

September 24, 2020 | In the News

Living in high altitude areas, children are more prone to developmental delays (Sohu.com)) 

Sohu.com published an article on about new research on stunting in higher altitudes. According to Senior Research Fellow Kalle Hirvonen, “More than 800 million people live at altitudes of 1,500 meters or higher, and two-thirds of them live in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. These two regions have most of the stunted children in the world, so understand that altitude […]

View all News