Strengthening science is one of the four key institutional goals of the World Agroforestry Centre.
 
To support science quality in all of our projects the Centre invests in a Research Method Group, jointly with ILRI that is also headquartered in Nairobi. The group ensures that our research is driven by clear conceptual frameworks consisting of problem definition, hypothesis, models and research questions and is implemented with well-documented research designs and methods and appropriate statistical analysis.

Capacity building of partners in good research design and methodologies is also a fundamental aspect of our work.

The Centre is also practicing an “Open Data initiative” and the Research Method Group maintains our data in the public domain, which allows our work to be widely applied and improved.

What we do

Examined raw data and revealed weaknesses in the data, sp suggested methods for verification and calibration.
Developed a framework for analyzing the tradeoff between precision and the cost of various sampling schemes.
Showed how generalized linear models could be used and described a method for estimating bias.