MutwiriC/compound-crisis-cascade-kenya

Analyzing how rainfall deficits cascade into food price spikes and conflict in Kenya's vulnerable counties, using Granger causality on climate, price, and conflict data (2006-2025). # Compound Crisis Cascade: Kenya ## How Climate Shocks Trigger Food Price Spikes and Conflict in Kenya's Vulnerable Counties --- ## What This Project Investigates This project tests whether severe rainfall deficits in Kenyan counties systematically precede sharp increases in staple food prices, which in turn precede a rise in conflict events, and quantifies the lag between each stage of that cascade. The analysis window covers 19 years (2006-2025), 47 Kenyan counties, and six datasets from the HDX Humanitarian API. All prices are deflated to real 2010 KES to isolate genuine food stress from general inflation. The goal is to identify the operational window between a climate shock and a protection crisis, when anticipatory humanitarian action is still possible. --- ## Why It Matters Kenya loses an estimated 2-3% of GDP annually to drought-related crises. The data exists to predict these cascades. What is missing is a tool that reads climate, price, and conflict signals together and in sequence. This project builds the analytical logic for that tool. --- ## What This Project Found The cascade exists, is conditional on structural vulnerability, and does not appear in well-integrated urban counties. - Rainfall deficits precede real maize price spikes at a 2-3 month lag across high-vulnerability counties - Price spikes precede conflict escalation at a 3-4 month lag. Granger temporal precedence confirmed in Marsabit (Rainfall -> Price: F=3.29, p=0.040, lag 2; Price -> Conflict: F=5.42, p=0.021, lag 1). Marginal results in Turkana (p=0.077 and p=0.073). Absent in Mandera (cross-border price dynamics suspected). Reverse direction non-significant in all counties - The two-link cascade is detectable only in 7 counties with MPI >= 0.30. It is absent in medium and low-vulnerability counties - Each drought cycle raises the real maize price floor permanently. Cumulative multi-cycle stress, rather than individual events, drives chronic vuln …