Policy makers and utility managers can use a variety of tariff structures to calculate customers’ bills for water and sanitation services, ranging from a simple flat monthly fee to complicated multipart tariffs with seasonal pricing based on metered water use. This paper examines the performance of alternative tariff structures for water and wastewater services in Nairobi, Kenya.

The use of small-scale off-grid renewable energy for rural electrification is now seen as one sustainable energy solution. The expectations from such small-scale investment include meeting basic household energy needs and thereby improving some aspects of household welfare. However, these stated benefits remain largely hypothetical because there are data and methodological challenges in existing literature attempting to isolate such impacts. This paper uses field data from micro hydro schemes in Kenya and a propensity score matching technique to demonstrate such an impact.

The changing weather patterns and seasonal shifts are negatively impacting agricultural ecosystems and compromising the benefits from production of agricultural goods and services. Such impacts include reduced farm returns, reduced household incomes, increase in poverty levels, and reduction in farm productivity and efficiency. Using three waves of panel data, this study applies a monotonic translog stochastic frontier (SFA) to assess the overall farm efficiency and the influence of climatic factors, agro-ecological factors, and household factors on farm level efficiency.

Climate change and variability are affecting weather patterns and causing seasonal shifts with serious repercussions for households and communities in Kenya. The livelihoods of the majority of Kenyans are therefore threatened due to the potential adverse impacts of climate change, such as declining production and productivity, which could lead to food insecurity. To mitigate the negative impacts of climate change and variability, farmers need to adopt different strategies, such as new crop varieties, crop and livestock diversification, and water-harvesting technologies.