Nassir Millao

Nassir Millao is a doctoral candidate at the University of Kassel in the field of International Agricultural Policy and Environmental Governance. He completed his BSc in Agricultural and Resource Economics and Business Administration in 2021 and his MA in Economics at the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) in 2024. During his master’s program, he received support through a Chachage scholarship.

Nassir has a strong international educational background, including a short-term course in “Food Security and Gender” at Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands), which was funded by an OKP scholarship in 2023, as well as an agripreneurship summer program at TU Berlin (Germany), which was supported by an AESDEA scholarship in 2024. Prior to his doctoral studies, he served as an Early Career Scholar from 2022 to 2026 as part of the RSM2SNF project, an initiative that, in collaboration with Michigan State University, the University of Dar es Salaam, and Sokoine University of Agriculture, aims to support value chains in food production.

Research Focus

Nassir’s research focuses on the intersection of quantitative data analysis, value chain analysis, gender analysis, agricultural economics, and environmental governance. His doctoral dissertation is currently part of the interdisciplinary KILI-SES project (2025–2029), which explores nature’s contributions to human well-being within the Kilimanjaro Social-Ecological System. In his current research, he examines how smallholder farmers adapt to concurrent macroeconomic pressures, focusing specifically on sharply rising fertilizer prices, increasing pesticide costs, and acute water scarcity. He assesses how these adaptation strategies differ across various agricultural systems to identify the underlying factors influencing farmers’ decisions, and also analyzes how household-level decisions influence adaptation choices and what specific challenges male and female farmers face during this transition period. Furthermore, he examines the specific socio-ecological configurations, governance structures, and institutional conditions that motivate farmers and local community members to actively plant and maintain trees.