Wanyi Li

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2018 - 2019 Academic Year

Afforestation Incentive Design for Smallholder Farmers in Uganda

Mature indigenous trees on the agricultural landscape improve agricultural yields and help nations reach their biodiversity and climate change targets. However, smallholding farmers often abandon tree growing before the trees reach maturity, due to labor and cash constraints exacerbated by the slow and risky process of tree growing. This project leverages economic and computational theories of mechanism design, to design a long-term incentive program to encourage tree growing on farms. A pilot version will be implemented in the field with smallholding farmers in rural Uganda. This work will demonstrate that smartly designed, incentive schemes can use funding efficiently to achieve higher environmental outcomes while improving the livelihood of smallholder farmers.

Wanyi Li, Department of Management Science and Engineering

Wanyi Li is a PhD student in operations management in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. She holds a BA in physics from Wellesley College. Her PhD thesis is on market design for environmental conservation developing theoretical models for payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes. Li also collaborates with international NGOs to make use of the theories. She is a recipient of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship.

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