Research Projects

Overview of ongoing projects

(An overview of our overarching research areas and vision can be found here)

FLOWERS: Facilitating local organic waste exchange for regenerative systems

Summary: Rapid urbanization across sub-Saharan Africa is intensifying the generation of organic waste from restaurants, food vendors, and canteens while rural farming systems face chronic soil nutrient depletion and declining productivity. Despite the nutrient value of urban organic waste, weak linkages between cities and surrounding agricultural areas result in pollution, resource loss, and missed opportunities for circular food systems. This disconnect between nutrient-rich urban waste streams and nutrient-poor smallholder farms represents a gap in current food and waste management systems. The FLOWERS project addresses this gap by strengthening organic waste value chains that link restaurants, traders, and farmers, with the goal of improving soil fertility, livestock feed availability, and environmental outcomes—while reducing waste collection fees for restaurants. Focusing on Uganda and Malawi, the project combines waste-flow mapping, surveys of restaurants, traders, and farmers, and targeted supply-chain interventions, alongside piloting scalable treatment options such as composting, black soldier fly farming, and anaerobic digestion to generate transferable evidence for rapidly urbanizing contexts.

Focus countries: Uganda and Malawi
Contact: Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: Global Health Engineering Group (ETH Zurich), Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag); Makerere University; End Plastic Pollution, and Waste Advisers Malawi.
Duration 6/2026 - 5/2028
Funding: Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), an initiative convened by the United Nations’ Environmental Programme (UNEP) via the CCAC Food and Nutrition Challenge Programme 2025

Sustainability standards and the hidden middle: Insights from cocoa cooperatives and theirworkers in Côte d’Ivoire

Summary: Sustainability standards such as Fairtrade aim to improve social and environmental conditions in global supply chains, particularly for tropical commodities like cocoa. While existing research has largely focused on farmers and consumers, cooperatives and their employees—despite their central role in the cocoa sector and in certification systems—remain under-researched. This project addresses this gap by examining how sustainability standards affect cocoa cooperatives and the working conditions of their employees. The main objective is to understand how and why cooperatives adopt, maintain, or abandon certification, and how certification influences their financial performance, operational practices, and governance structures. In addition, the project investigates whether sustainability standards contribute to the creation of better jobs across different skill levels within cooperatives. Empirically, the study is based on surveys of 200 cocoa cooperatives and 1000 workers in Côte d’Ivoire. Côte d’Ivoire—the world’s largest cocoa producer—is a particularly relevant case study.

Focus country: Côte d’Ivoire
Contacts: Dr. Marine Jouvin, Karamoko Barro, and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: World Agroforestry (ICRAF) and Wageningen University
Duration: 9/2025 - 8/2029
Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), project funding

AgriFoodTech startups for agrifood systems transformation in Africa

Summary: Agrifoodtech startups are increasingly viewed as key actors in transforming African food systems by improving efficiency, resilience, and sustainability, while also contributing to innovation, employment, and food security. Much of their anticipated impact depends on their ability to scale and sustain solutions that effectively serve smallholder farmers. However, despite growing interest, existing research focuses primarily on farmer-level outcomes and offers limited insight into the factors that enable agrifoodtech startups themselves to succeed and drive lasting change. As a result, the commercial, financial, and systemic challenges and opportunities facing these firms remain poorly understood, and the role of non-dilutive capital as a dominant source of funding has received little scholarly attention. This project addresses these gaps by generating evidence on the determinants of agrifoodtech startup success and the implications of public and non-dilutive financing for strategic behavior and performance. It does so by combining secondary data analysis, semi-structured interviews, and a large-scale survey of agrifoodtech startups across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Contacts: Wycliffe Otieno,Hauke Dahl, and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center forTropical Agriculture (CIAT)
Duration: 1/2024 - 10/2028
Funding: ETH for Development (ETH4D), doctoral fellowship

WE SEED: Scientists and farmers for better seeds

Summary: Crop breeding programs play a central role in delivering healthy, nutritious,
and climate-resilient crops needed for sustainable food systems. Achieving this goal depends critically on effective collaboration between scientists and farmers, particularly through participatory breeding approaches that integrate local knowledge into varietal development. However, little is known about how breeding programs choose and implement on-farm and on-station participatory methods, or how these choices shape whose knowledge is engaged and represented, especially among marginalized groups such as women farmers. As a result, the mechanisms through which farmer–scientist interactions influence breeding outcomes remain insufficiently understood.
The WE SEED project addresses this gap by generating evidence on how participatory methods affect knowledge coordination and inclusion in crop breeding. The project combines ethnographic, econometric, and machine-learning approaches, engaging women and men farmers and scientists working on pigeon pea and cowpea, and produces tools such as a farmer-led crop ontology, ethnographic analyses, and role-game workshops to inform policy and practice in public breeding programs.

Focus country: Malawi
Contacts: Dr. Occelli Martina and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR) and Malawi’s Department of
Agricultural Research (DARS)
Duration: 10/2025 - 4/2027
Funding: ETH for Development (ETH4D),
research challenges grant

Agro-Econfirm: A farm-to-fork approach tosustainable vegetable production and healthy diets

Summary: Ensuring theproduction of safe vegetables is essential for public health and sustainable food systems, yet it remains highly labor-intensive for smallholder farmers. In rural Vietnam, limited access to affordable labor and weak incentives for safe production encourage the use of harmful agrochemicals, while farmers struggle to credibly communicate food safety to price-constrained consumers. Despite the potential of voluntary sustainability standards and participatory guarantee systems (PGS) to support knowledge sharing and market trust, participation has stagnated or declined, indicating a gap between available approaches and locally viable solutions. This project addresses this gap by identifying how labor-saving production techniques and consumer-facing communication strategies can be adapted to local conditions to revitalize PGS participation. It does so by generating evidence on farmer constraints, testing context-appropriate technical and marketing innovations, and analyzing value-chain dynamics, with the dual aim of strengthening local vegetable value chains and providing policymakers with an evidence base to support the scaling of safe vegetable initiatives in Vietnam.

Focus Country: Vietnam
Contacts: Prof. Eva-MarieMeemken, Dr. Patrick Illien
Partners: Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) and Vietnam National
University of Agriculture (VNUA)
Duration: 10/2025 - 9/2029
Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Vietnamese-Swiss joint research program

Decent work and labor supply in Swiss horticulture

Summary: Horticultural production relies heavily on human labor, yet working conditions in agriculture are often precarious, contributing to low domestic labor supply and growing labor shortages. These challenges are intensified by demographic change and raise pressing questions about how to ensure sustainable labor supply and decent work in domestic vegetable production, a particularly relevant issue for Switzerland given its high dependence on imported horticultural products. Despite increasing attention in public debate, there is insufficient empirical evidence on the prevalence of poor working conditions across different worker groups, including migrant and non-migrant workers, and on how farmers actually secure and manage their workforce. Moreover, significant data gaps persist, especially for migrant workers who are largely absent from quantitative datasets. This project addresses these gaps by generating evidence on labor conditions and labor management strategies in horticulture. It employs a mixed-methods design combining qualitative stakeholder interviews, grounded theory analysis, respondent-driven sampling, and secondary data analysis.

Focus country: Switzerland
Contacts:Celestina Heepen and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: Agricultural Economics and Policy Group (ETH Zurich) and UC Louvain
Duration: 2/2024 - 1/2027
Funding: ETH collaboration grant

Agricultural labor markets and policy in Europe

Summary: Minimum wage policies are a central labor-market institution worldwide, designed to protect low-skilled workers from low pay and precarious employment. In agriculture, where labor costs constitute a substantial share of production expenses, such policies are particularly salient for both social protection and sectoral competitiveness. Existing research demonstrates that minimum wages are generally effective in raising earnings for low-skilled agricultural workers. However, much less is known about how these policies affect farmers themselves. Farmers organizations often argue that higher labor standards undermine farm profitability and incentivize the relocation of labor-intensive production to countries with lower standards. Despite the prominence of these claims in public debates, there is limited evidence on the actual effects of labor regulations on farm economic performance and agricultural trade outcomes. This project addresses this gap by providing rigorous empirical evidence on how labor policies shape farming viability and international trade patterns. Focusing on the European Union, the study employs harmonized secondary data and quantitative econometric methods to analyze the impacts of changes in labor standards on agricultural production decisions and cross-border trade flows.

Focus region: Europe, Germany
Contacts: Marie Kammer and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: Purdue University
Duration: 2/2023 - 1/2027
Funding: Fulbright Schuman grant for research stay at Purdue (grantee: Marie Kammer)

Agricultural wage employment in Nigeria’s growing tomato sector

Summary: Agricultural labor markets in Sub-Saharan Africa underpin rural employment and food production, shaping poverty reduction, productivity growth, and the inclusiveness of agricultural transformation. Their functioning therefore matters for decent work, efficient allocation of labor, and the ability of workers and farmers to respond to changing economic and climatic conditions. Despite this, these markets are widely assumed to be highly imperfect, characterized by poor working conditions, persistent labor shortages alongside underemployment, rigid wages, limited mobility, and opaque information. However, there is little rigorous empirical evidence on these failures, nor quantitative understanding of how emerging trends—such as commercially oriented farms and labor contractors—affect decent work. This project addresses these gaps by providing policy-relevant evidence on the structure, functioning, and welfare implications of agricultural labor markets. We focus on the growing tomato sector in Nigeria, which involves commercially-oriented farms and different types of migrant and local workers, recruited directly by farmers or via labor contractors. The project combines matched farmer–worker survey data, interviews with labor contractors, and survey experiments to identify constraints and pathways for improving labor market performance and job quality.

Focus country: Nigeria
Contacts: Olayinka Aremu, Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: University of Ibadan and KU Leuven
Duration: 3/2022 - 3/2026

Agricultural labor markets amidst conflict in Myanmar

Summary: Violent conflict has reached its highest global level since World War II, directly affecting around two billion people and reshaping livelihoods across large parts of the world. The burden of conflict falls disproportionately on already vulnerable populations, including food-insecure countries and landless rural workers who depend on agricultural labor markets. While recent research has increasingly examined how conflict affects agricultural production, far less is known about its implications for agricultural labor markets. In particular, evidence is scarce on how conflict influences women’s and men’s farm wages, mental health, and labor productivity, leaving key welfare effects poorly understood. This project addresses these gaps by analyzing how violent conflict shapes labor markets, working conditions, and mental health among farm workers. Focusing on Myanmar—one of today’s most severe conflict settings—we generate new evidence through the collection of unique, large-scale survey data among farm workers nationwide, combined with secondary conflict data and survey experiments that exploit variation in conflict intensity to assess impacts and data quality in conflict-affected contexts.

Focus country: Myanmar
Contacts: Andew Laitha and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Duration: 5/2022 - 4/2026
Funding: Leading House Asia Early-Career Grant 2024 for research stay at IFPRI in Laos P.D.R (Grantee: Andrew Laitha)

Past projects

Empowering informal workers through unionization

Summary: Informal labor dominates employment across Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, shaping livelihoods and inequality, with food systems absorbing large shares of informal workers. Within these systems, informal food services employ many women under precarious conditions, making the sector central to debates on gender, work quality, and social protection. Despite this relevance, existing research has largely focused on self-mployed operators, overlooking workers hired by self-employed entrepreneurs who experience distinct vulnerabilities. Moreover, there is insufficient evidence on how precarious conditions can be improved in practice, and on whether worker unionization can play a meaningful role for hired food service sector in the informal economy. This project addresses these gaps by examining food service workers in Accra, Ghana, and by foregrounding workers’ own assessments of their working conditions and the potential contributions of unions. We collaborate with Ghana’s key worker union and use participatory photovoice methods with informal food service workers to generate qualitative data on working conditions, collective action, and pathways to improved prospects and social protection, with implications extending beyond Ghana.

Focus country: Ghana
Contacts: Dr. Patrick Illien, Dr. Anna Fabry, and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: University of Ghana and Informal Economy Workers’ Forum (INFORUM)
Duration: 12/2023 - 1/2025
Funding: ETH for Development (ETH4D), pilot grant