Director, NCIR; Manager, ICFI Kenya
Dr Elsie Onsongo is the Centre Director of Nuvoni Centre for Innovation Research, which hosts the International Centre for Frugal Innovation - Kenya Hub. Her research interests relate to innovation for inclusive development in sub-Saharan Africa, with a current focus on frugality, inclusion and sustainability in energy access, technology management, and urban development.
She adopts a multidisciplinary approach in her analysis of innovation, combining perspectives from economics, science and technology studies, and organisational studies.
Ongoing research projects:
Elsie has previously contributed to the Modern Energy Cooking Services programme as a southern partner, and researched the potential for private sector led innovation in primary healthcare in inducing transformations in community-level healthcare delivery. She has also contributed to advancing the thinking on sustainability science in Africa, and explored how the financial services sector in Kenya has transformed with the entry of mobile money innovation.
Elsie has a PhD from the Economics of Innovative Change; a programme jointly offered by Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Max Planck Institute of Economics, Germany. She previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and has been a visiting research fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, UK. She has worked at Strathmore University in Kenya in various teaching, research and administrative capacities.
