Joseph Karugia is a Principal Scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Nairobi, Kenya with expertise in agricultural economics and policy. He is the Interim Team Leader of the Policies and Foresight Team in the Policies, Institutions and Livelihoods Program of ILRI. Joseph is also serving as the Interim CGIAR Country Convener for Kenya. For about fourteen years until September 2021, Joseph was the Coordinator of the Eastern and Central Africa Node of the Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS) which was, at the time, facilitated by ILRI and the Internatioonal Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). ReSAKSS is an information and knowledge management initiative with the objective of providing data, information and knowledge to governments, donors, and other stakeholders to improve the formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), Africa’s blue print for transformaing food systems.
Prior to joining ILRI, Joseph was Research Manager at the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), a premier economics research institution with a mandate of building capacity in policy-oriented economic research in sub–Saharan Africa. He was a faculty member at the University of Nairobi for more than twenty-eight years and served as Chairman of the Department of Agricultural Economics in 2002-2003. He has published numerous scholarly papers and is a member of several professional bodies. He holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Nairobi, and a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Alberta, Canada.