At the heart of Katrina's work is a desire to improve long-term food security in developing countries through ecologically-sound policies in the fisheries sector.
Her path towards this goal includes fourteen years of experience throughout parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, working in the fields of marine resource management, aquaculture and agriculture. Professionally, she spent several years in Washington DC supporting and designing USAID-funded fisheries and agriculture programs in Sri Lanka and the Philippines. She also worked with the UN Food & Agriculture Organization to develop recommendations to bring together eight South Asian nations to improve marine resource management under the Bay of Bengal Large Marine Ecosystem Program. More recently, she authored articles about agricultural practices in Mali, as well as the recent famine in the Horn of Africa.
In addition to her work in the international development industry, she also brings several years of experience in the private sector. She consulted to a drip irrigation and greenhouse company in Israel, helping develop business plans for projects in Bahrain and China, and also simultaneously co-founded and managed a farm on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Previous academic work includes an analysis of community perceptions of marine protected areas in Kenya and the Philippines, as well as an analysis of the challenges of implementing trans-boundary marine governance projects, using the Coral Triangle Initiative in Southeast Asia as a case study.
As part of her current PhD research, Katrina is returning to her native Kenya to analyze aquaculture and fisheries policies and their connections to food security. Specifically, she is (1) quantifying the impacts of an aquaculture subsidy program on household food security, national fish output, and the aquaculture supply chain, and (2) pairing data on offshore fisheries access agreements with estimates of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing activities occurring within East African EEZs. She conducts this work in conjunction with The Stanford Center on Food Security and the Environment, The Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, and key partners on the ground in Kenya.