Two CoRE IPD Members at the University of Groningen Secure Major Research Grants

The ARUA–The Guild Cluster of Research Excellence in Inequality, Poverty and Deprivation (CoRE IPD) celebrates the success of two of its members from the University of Groningen, who have each secured significant research funding to advance work on economic development and poverty reduction.

Professor Jutta Bolt has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant worth €2 million for her project Africa@Work (AWORK). The project will examine how work and livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa have evolved over the past century, a period marked by profound economic, demographic, and social transformations.

Focusing on 33 countries with diverse colonial legacies and post-independence development paths, AWORK aims to reconstruct detailed occupational structures from 1920 to 2020. By drawing on colonial censuses, labour surveys, and post-independence microdata, the project will build a comprehensive database capturing trends by gender, sector, location, and employment type. This will help researchers better understand long-term shifts in labour markets—such as when workers moved out of agriculture, how formal and informal employment evolved, and how economic opportunities changed across regions. The project addresses a major empirical gap: despite Africa’s rapidly expanding and diversifying workforce, reliable long-run data on employment structures remain fragmented or unavailable.

Professor Robert Lensink has received a €200,000 grant from Open Science NL for the project “Encouraging Fertilizer Use: A Replication Study with Cashew Farmers in Ghana.” The study will replicate and extend a landmark 2011 experiment by Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, and Jonathan Robinson on nudging fertilizer use among farmers.

The original study demonstrated that a simple, low-cost “nudge”—allowing farmers to pay for fertilizer when they are financially liquid while receiving free delivery later—substantially increased fertilizer uptake among maize farmers in Kenya. Lensink’s team will test whether similar behavioural interventions can increase fertilizer adoption among cashew farmers in Ghana. The results will help assess whether such nudges can offer a cost-effective alternative to fertilizer subsidies, which many African governments are reconsidering due to rising fertilizer prices, fiscal constraints, and climate-related disruptions.

Together, these grants strengthen the research capacity of CoRE IPD by expanding its evidence base on labour markets, agricultural productivity, and development policy in Africa—core themes in understanding and addressing inequality, poverty, and deprivation.