TA (Tanik) Joshipura, MSc

Tanik Joshipura is a development economist and economic historian in the Economic and Environmental History Group at Wageningen University & Research. His PhD research examines why sub-Saharan Africa came to depend increasingly on imported food over the twentieth century. It looks at how the region’s biogeography, population growth, urbanisation and trade shaped its ability to feed itself, and why cities shifted from local food supply to the world market. To answer these questions, Tanik built several long-run datasets, including the populations of more than 6,400 African cities since around 1500 and a century of East African food prices collected from colonial archives. His work combines archival research, econometrics and spatial analysis, and has been published in Economic History of Developing Regions.

Tanik grew up in Tanzania. Before turning to research, he worked in non-profit management in Tanzania, Uganda and the United States, managing microfinance, small business finance and rural women’s entrepreneurship projects. In the Netherlands, he works as a Development Economist at KIT Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, where he carries out impact evaluations of agricultural programmes in cocoa, coffee and food crops across sub-Saharan Africa. His educational background is in economics, with a focus on sustainability and growth. Outside of work, he takes great pleasure in cooking, travelling and all things wildlife.