Stabilizing Production under Climate Stress: Evidence from Small-Scale Solar Irrigation in Kenya
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2026-01-05
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Smallholder agriculture underpins livelihoods in Kenya, with more than 70% of the rural population relying on farming as their primary source of income. Most of these farmers rely on rainfed production in an environment marked by rising temperatures, increasingly variable rainfall, and frequent economic and climate shocks. Research led by Duke University and the University of Nairobi evaluated the SunCulture model—a Kenyan social enterprise providing small-scale solar irrigation systems bundled with financing and support services.
The study ends with three sets of implications:
National irrigation policy should move beyond a focus on large-scale, publicly delivered schemes to better support the smallholder-led investment pathways that are already driving irrigation expansion.
Solar irrigation companies, lenders, and other market participants should work to reduce affordability barriers by offering repayment terms that reflect farmers’ seasonal cash flows, linking financial support to verified outcomes, and bundling services that lower early-stage adoption risk.
Measurement and evidence systems should be developed further to better capture the value of resilience-enhancing interventions, including building confidence around co-benefits of carbon mitigation.
Ecosystem actors should adopt standardized, decision-relevant resilience metrics that can enable comparison and prioritization of interventions across sectors and geographies. Across these areas, the evaluation highlights that intrahousehold decision-making and labor dynamics influence how irrigation investments translate into household outcomes, underscoring that impacts may vary across households and over time.
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Elsharief, Mirna, Alejandro Diaz-Herrera, Marc Jeuland, Jonathan Phillips and Ferrán Vega-Carol (2026). Stabilizing Production under Climate Stress: Evidence from Small-Scale Solar Irrigation in Kenya. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/34176.
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Scholars@Duke
Marc A. Jeuland
Marc Jeuland is a Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, with a joint appointment in the Duke Global Health Institute. His research interests include nonmarket valuation, water and sanitation, environmental health, energy poverty and transitions, trans-boundary water resource planning and management, and the impacts and economics of climate change.
Jeuland's recent research includes work to understand the economic implications of climate change for water resources projects on transboundary river systems, a range of primary data collection projects related to analysis of adoption of environmental health improving technology, and analysis of the costs and benefits of environmental health interventions in developing countries. He has conducted multiple field experiments on issues such as: the role of water quality information in affecting household water and hygiene behaviors; the demand for, and impacts of cleaner cookstoves on household well-being; the long-term sustainability and effects of rural sanitation and water supply projects. He has also collected data on preferences for a range of environmental health improvements including cholera vaccines, household water treatment technologies and improved cookstoves. In the energy and development domain, he is currently working on several projects with the Energy Access Project at Duke, and is a co-founder of the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative (SETI), along with Professor Subhrendu Pattanayak and scholars from Chile, China and Ethiopia. His energy portfolio includes work related to evaluation of cleaner cooking interventions, measuring energy access and reliability, and reviews of the drivers and impacts literature related to energy.
Jeuland has worked in the past with the World Bank, USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, UNICEF, and many field-based NGOs and community-based implementing organizations.
Prior to his graduate studies and work with the World Bank, Jeuland was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa, where he designed and monitored construction of a pilot wastewater treatment system and trained management personnel at the plant’s managing firm.
Jonathan Phillips
Jonathan Phillips is the Director of the James E. Rogers Energy Access Project at Duke University, with an appointment at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. His work focuses on policy, regulatory, and economic issues related to rural electrification, grid de-carbonization, off-grid energy systems, and energy for productivity.
Phillips was the senior advisor to the president and CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation during the Obama Administration, helping scale-up the agency’s climate finance capabilities and lead the implementation of strategic initiatives, including the agency’s $2.1 billion Power Africa portfolio.
Before that, Phillips led private sector engagement and programming with Power Africa at USAID, helping ramp-up the $300 million presidential initiative into one of the largest public-private development partnerships in the world.
From 2007-2014, he held a variety of roles in the U.S. Congress, most recently serving as the senior policy advisor to Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. He supported many notable legislative efforts, including serving as one of the lead authors of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in 2009. He also served on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming as well as the House Natural Resources Committee.
Phillips was a business and economic development volunteer with the Peace Corps in Mongolia. He received a bachelor’s degree from the Milwaukee School of Engineering and a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.
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