People

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Catherine Boone is Professor of Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a political scientist interested in patterns conducted research on industrial, commercial, and land tenure policies in West Africa, where her work has been funded by the SSRC, Fulbright, the World Bank, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and the ACLS, and the Long Chair in Democratic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Co-PIs

Leigh Gardner is Associate Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics and a Research Associate in African Economic History at Stellenbosch University. Her work focuses on the economic and financial history of sub-Saharan Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular public finance at national and local levels.

Fibian Lukalo is a sociologist committed to social justice research especially in the fields of gender, land governance and education. She currently serves as the Director for Research at the National Lands Commission (NLC) - Kenya. She holds a PhD in Educational Sociology and Gender from Cambridge University and a Diploma from Columbia Law School & The Earth Institute (USA) on Extractives and Sustainable Development. Her work focuses on analyses of the relationship between land, gender and livelihoods (history, legal, tenure security) and on tracing what this means for land policy, research methodology. She has published extensively on education, gender, land and social justice affairs.

Andrew Linke is an Assistant Professor in the Geography Department at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a funded external senior research associate at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He uses Geographic Information Systems, spatial statistics, large population surveys and qualitative fieldwork to understand the geographies of human-environment interactions and violent conflict.

Michael Wahman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. He received his PhD in Political Science from Lund University in 2012. He specializes in comparative politics, particularly African politics, and issues of democratization and elections in new democracies.

PROJECT RESEARCH FELLOWS

Juliette Crespin-Boucaud is Project Research Fellow for the Spatial Inequalities project for 2020-2021. She is a PhD student in economics at the Paris School of Economics. Her research interests are development economics, economic history, and family economics, with a focus on ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa.

Michaela Collord is a Junior Research Fellow in politics at New College, University of Oxford. Her research interests include the political economy of authoritarian rule, dominant parties and legislatures, democratization and the history and politics of sub-Saharan Africa. She has conducted fieldwork in Uganda, Tanzania and Benin.

Jennifer Köhler is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics. Her research interests are at the intersection of economic history and political economy. She is interested in the interaction between culture and institutions in the long run, in particular with a view towards gender questions in African Economic History.

RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

Eva Richter is an undergraduate student at the LSE studying International Relations. Before coming to the LSE, she worked at the Lesotho National Commission for UNESCO for a year, where she assisted with the implementation of UNESCO policies in the country. Since then, she has also worked for the German Foreign Office as an event coordinator for the Ambassadors Conference 2019. In her studies, she is interested in International Political Economy and Security Studies with a focus on Africa and the Middle East. As a research assistant to this project, she uses Stata and Python to prepare and compute electoral, demographic and health survey (DHS), and population data.

Jonathan Karl is a graduate student at the LSE studying Applied Social Data Science. He has a background in sustainable development which he studied at the University of Warwick. During his studies there he has worked on measures of multidimensional poverty, worked at the research institute World Data Lab estimating poverty structures using daylight satellite imagery and nightlight intensity data and led the international development society. As part of his graduate studies, he is exploring innovative methods of poverty measurement using Facebook API data in northern Africa. As a research assistant in this project, he uses Stata, Python and R to prepare, analyse and map electoral data.

RESEARCHERS

Stephan Kyburz was 2019 Research Fellow for the Spatial Inequalities project, based in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. Previously he was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Development. He completed his PhD in Economics at the Department of Economics, University of Bern, Switzerland, and spent the year 2017 at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science funded by a Fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation. His research interests include Economic Growth and Development, Political Economy, and Conflict Economics. He specializes in combining Geographic Information System techniques with empirical economic analysis.

Robert Nilson Wayumba is a lecturer at the Technical University of Kenya, School of Surveying and Spatial Science. He holds a PhD from the University of Otago New Zealand's National School of Surveying, a Master of Science in Land Management from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm Sweden, and a Bachelor of Science in Surveying from the University of Nairobi. His research interests are in areas related to land administration, land registration and development of Land Information Systems (LIS).

Aristide Mah Dion has a Master's degree in Ethics and Governance with a specialization in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action from CERAP. His research focused on the impacts of land rights formalisation on youth land access in Côte d'Ivoire. He is interested in public policy, governance, and land reform, as well as employment and income in contexts of uncertainty for youths and women.

Zibo Irigo is a Master’s student in Ethics and Governance, with a specialization in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action, at CERAP. His thesis deals with the fate reserved for the right of rural women to land in the context of land certification in two regions of Côte d'Ivoire. He has a Master's degree in public law from the University of Cocody in Côte d'Ivoire and is interested in economic, social and cultural rights, as well as rural land law.

Jutta Bolt is an associate professor at Lund University and the University of Groningen. She is also the coordinator and one of the developers of the Maddison Project database. Her research focuses on understanding long-term comparative economic development patterns, with a special focus on Africa. Current projects include understanding long-term population dynamics in Africa, researching the historical origins of present-day income inequality in Africa and studying the historical development of local and central government capacity in Africa.

Paddy Makene is a Surveyor with the Ministry of Lands and Physical Planning in Kenya and a research intern at the National Land Commission. He is currently working on his MA thesis in Urban and Regional Planning at Kenyatta University, which examines the links between land uses, environmental degradation, and land competition on Chepchonia Settlement Scheme in Trans Nzoia County. For this project, he helped coordinate the georeferencing of the Survey of Kenya maps at the NLC in Nairobi and georeferenced more scheme maps at the University of Richmond in 2018..

Rebecca Simson is the David Richards Junior Research Fellow in Economic History at Wadham College, Oxford University. She holds a PhD in Economic History from the LSE and a bachelor's degree in History from Princeton University. Her current project explores social and economic processes of change in postcolonial Africa, with a focus on social mobility, social stratification and elite formation since independence. Her research interests include African economic history, inequality and social mobility, state development in Africa, public finance and aid. She worked on the SIAPE Project in 2018-2019.

AFFILIATE

Alexander Moradi is Professor in Economics at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. He is a specialist in employing historical data to analyze health, living standards, urban development and the effects of trade on local populations. He has published extensively, including in the American Economic Journal, The Economic Journal and Review of Economics and Statistics. For this project, he has been working with Juliette Crespin-Boucaud on researching the long-run effects of the 1960s land allocation programs as part of the Kenya Settlement Schemes project.

GRANT ADMINISTRATOR

Shelly Wilkley has worked at LSE since 2011 in the Departments of Law and Government. She has served as the Department of Government's Undergraduate Programmes Manager, Deputy Department Manager (Education) and Department Manager. As Research Manager, beginning in 2018, she is responsible for managing the Department's research activities, governance and REF profile, including the project management of its 12 externally-funded research grants. Shelly has been providing project management support, including financial management, contract management, recruitment and employment advice/support, and international conference delivery, to the Spatial Inequalities and African Political Economies team since the project's launch in March 2018.