
Apurba SheeUniversity of Greenwich · Department of Food and Markets
Apurba Shee
PhD
About
35
Publications
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Introduction
Dr Apurba Shee is a Business Development Economist and Senior Lecturer at the Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Greenwich. Prior to joining NRI in 2017, Apurba worked at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) based in Tanzania for three years where he worked on Africa RISING projects in Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Ethiopia, Ghana and Mali and also led an innovative financing project in Kenya. Before that Apurba was a scientist (agricultural economist) with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) based in Kenya for three years, where he worked on design and evaluation of index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) in arid and semi-arid regions of Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. Apurba studied at Cornell and Penn State University.
Publications
Publications (35)
The promotion of improved maize varieties and chemical fertilisers underscores many policy approaches addressing multiple production risks such as poor soil fertility and drought. However, the unsustainable use of chemical fertilisers has important implications for soil degradation. The synergies between improved maize varieties and sustainable lan...
Background
In Sub-Saharan Africa, drought is one of the prevailing climatic conditions that has led to the modification of improved seeds to be resilient enough to improve yield and increase farm households' welfare. However, like most climate-smart agricultural practices, the adoption of drought-tolerant maize varieties is low. This study examines...
Poor storage methods lead to high postharvest losses in maize, an essential staple in sub-Saharan Africa. Smallholder farmers’ knowledge and awareness of postharvest nutritional losses (PHNLs), practices regarding maize grain storage, and factors influencing use of improved storage protection practices were investigated in two districts in Zimbabwe...
Postharvest losses (PHLs) amplify food insecurity and reduce the amount of nutrients available to vulnerable populations, especially in the world's Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs). However, little is known about nutrient loss at the various postharvest stages. The objective of our study was to develop a methodology and a tool to estimate nu...
Weather index insurance (WII) has been a promising innovation that protects smallholder farmers against drought risks and provides resilience against adverse rainfall conditions. However, the uptake of WII has been hampered by high spatial and intra-seasonal basis risk. To minimize intra-seasonal basis risk, the standard approaches to designing WII...
Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) could play a critical role in addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, it will require an STI planning, investment and evaluation approach that in addition to economic growth, targets more explicitly, social inclusion and environmental sustainability to achieve balanced growth. This will...
We employ a discrete choice experiment to elicit demand and supply side preferences for insurance‐linked credit, a promising market‐based tool for managing agricultural weather risks and providing access to credit for farmers. We estimate preference heterogeneity using primary data from smallholder farmers and managers of lenders/insurers combined...
Purpose-Drought-related climate risk and access to credit are among the major risks to agricultural productivity for smallholder farmers in Kenya. Farmers are usually credit-constrained due to either involuntary quantity rationing or voluntary risk rationing. By exploiting randomized distribution of weather risk-contingent credit (RCC) and traditio...
Initiatives on the sustainable intensification of agriculture have introduced improved technologies tailored to farmers’ local conditions by trial demonstration with free provision of improved seeds and fertilizers. It is not clear, though, whether smallholder farmers would be willing to pay for these technologies, and what factors determine their...
Drought related climate risk and access to credit are among the major risks to agricultural
productivity for smallholder farmers in Kenya. Farmers are usually credit constrained either due to involuntary quantity rationing or voluntary risk rationing. By exploiting randomized distribution of weather risk contingent credit and traditional credit, we...
It has long been recognized that investment is needed to build capacity in Science Technology and Innovation (STI) particularly in low
and medium income (LMI) countries. Yet there is little understanding as to how to do this. The combination of a) the use of research
and innovation policy frameworks more aligned with High-Income Countries rather th...
Climate risk financing programs in agriculture have caught the attention of researchers and policy makers over the last decade. Weather index insurance has emerged as a promising market-based risk financing mechanism. However, to develop a suitable weather index insurance mechanism it is essential to incorporate the distribution of underlying weath...
Postharvest loss reduction throughout commodity value chains is an important pathway to food and nutrition security in sub-Saharan Africa. However, lack of understanding of the location and share of the losses and associated factors along the postharvest value chains remains a major challenge to operationalizing postharvest loss mitigation strategi...
Weather-related agricultural risks and limited access to credit are serious impediments to agricultural productivity and growth in developing countries. This paper describes a novel insurance linked credit model piloted in Kenya, where insurance markets are effectively absent, and farmers do not borrow because of the risk of losing their collateral...
A blog that explore why different sorts of knowledge system are required for different types of development agenda, and the way a sustainable development agenda adds urgency to arriving at something different from the past
Blog discussing the need to think about configurations of knowledge systems adapted for an era of sustainable development
Background
Maize is the most important staple crop for food security and livelihood of smallholder farmers in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, but it alone cannot ensure food security. Cropping patterns must be diversified to ensure an adequate supply and economic access to greater variety of foods for smallholder farm households. This study measu...
This paper models the bounded learning concept with the learning progress function characterized by the degree of efficiency and the specification of the learning progress as a logistic function capturing both the slow start-up and the limit in learning progress. We differentiate learning efficiency from the technical efficiency. The endogeneity co...
Index-Based Livestock Insurance has emerged as a promising market-based solution for insuring livestock against drought-related mortality. The objective of this work is to develop an explicit spatial econometric framework to estimate insurable indexes that can be integrated within a general insurance pricing framework. We explore the problem of est...
Vegetable crops have high farm gate values per unit land and contain the essential micronutrients, vitamins, phytochemicals and antioxidants critical for ensuring balanced diets and enhancing human nutrition. Vegetables are a major source of farm income for smallholders and thus contribute to improving livelihood status of smallholders in many deve...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to assess the feasibility of risk-contingent credit (RCC) by presenting an experimental and participatory game designed to explain the concept of RCC to Kenyan pastoralists and dairy farmers. The paper investigates the uptake potential of RCC through qualitative assessment of field experiments and focus groups...
Global insurance markets are vast and diverse, and may offer many opportunities for remote sensing. To date, however, few operational applications of remote sensing for insurance exist. Papers claiming potential application of remote sensing typically stress the technical possibilities, without considering its contribution to customer value for the...
Droughts induce livestock losses that severely affect Kenyan pastoralists. Recent index insurance schemes have the potential of being a viable tool for insuring pastoralists against drought-related risk. Such schemes require as input a forage scarcity (or drought) index that can be reliably updated in near real-time, and that strongly relates to li...
A major econometric issue in estimating production parameters and technical efficiency is the possibility that some forces
influencing production are only observed by the firm and not by the econometrician. Not only can this misspecification lead
to a biased inference on the output elasticity of inputs, but it also provides a faulty measure of tech...
This article addresses the problem of collateral‐free lending in the context of agricultural development. We investigate a viable alternative to traditional credit products through the development of risk‐contingent credit for operating loans and farm mortgages and apply the concept to agricultural loans for pulse crops in India. Risk‐contingent cr...
The measurement of productivity fluctuations has been the focus of decades-long interest. In addition to broad structural forces driving productivity changes, there is more recent interest in measuring and identifying the heterogeneous forces driving these changes. A major force is learning-by-doing which is used by economists to describe the pheno...
This paper investigates a viable alternative to traditional credit products through the development of risk-contingent credit for operating loans and farm mortgages and applies the concept to agricultural loans for pulse crops in India. We analyze daily commodity spot prices and design risk contingent structured financial instruments. Risk continge...
This research analyzes daily commodity spot prices and designs risk contingent structured financial instruments as a means to mitigate business and financial risk by reducing debt obligations depending on the embedded commodity options whose payoffs are linked with commodity price fluctuations. Models are developed for operating loans and farm mort...