About

Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean in the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He holds a B.A. in Economics from City College of New York, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Riverside. His professional experience includes roles as Associate Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Associate Chair and Professor of Economics, and Graduate Program Director at UMass Amherst, as well as positions at Gettysburg College and Florida Atlantic University. His research interests focus on the political economy of development, particularly in Africa, with a strong emphasis on issues of inequality, poverty, rural development, and the environment. He also explores Marxian class analysis, the impact of East Asian development on African countries, and decolonial studies. Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji has contributed to numerous academic journals, edited volumes, and book chapters, and serves on editorial boards for several scholarly publications. His work includes a focus on rethinking categories of economy and identity through decolonial reconstellations, and he actively participates in professional organizations related to African studies, development, and economics.

Research topics

• Economics
• Geography
• Development economics
• Political science
• Business

Selected publications

• The Role of Innovation in Achieving Structural Transformation and Sustainable Development: The Case of African Economies

  Open MIND · 2026-03-09

  otherOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dynamics of Deep Time and Deep Place

  2025-04-01

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Reconceiving Identities in Political Economy

  2025-04-01

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Uptake of diabetes testing and associated individual-level factors among people with a familial risk of diabetes mellitus in rural Kenya.

  Journal of Agriculture Science and Technology · 2025-04-14

  articleOpen access

  People with family history of diabetes are expected to have regular diabetes testing owing to their higher risk of the disease. Regular testing is associated with early diagnosis of diabetes and has a potential of reducing the health and economic burden caused by the disease. This study therefore sought to determine the uptake of diabetes testing and associated individual-level factors among relatives of individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Understanding uptake of diabetes testing among individuals with family history is a significant step towards promoting both primary and secondary prevention among this group at risk. This was a cross-sectional study among 202 adult relatives of patients with T2D in Kiambu county in Kenya. Multi-level sampling technique was employed and interviewer-administered questionnaire used to collect data. Descriptive statistics, Chi-square test for independence and Fisher's exact test as well as multivariate logistic regression were used to analyze data at 0.05 level of significance. The study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Review Committee of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. The results indicated that 52.5% of the relatives had never had a blood glucose test. Individual level factors that had a statistically significant association with uptake of diabetes testing included residence (p=0.003), employment status (p=0.019), familial risk awareness (P=0.003), perceived risk (p=0.002), knowledge of diabetes signs and symptoms (p=0.001) and relationship with the patient (p=0.045). Living in farms (AOR=3.9, p=0.002), being aware of own familial risk (AOR=2.5, p=0.016), high knowledge (AOR=2.3, p=0.017) and being a close relative to the patient (AOR= 3.0, p= 0.041) increased uptake of diabetes testing. In conclusion, uptake of diabetes testing is low and is associated with several individual-level factors that can be modified to increase the uptake. Strategies to increase uptake such as health education should be enhanced.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Conceptual Introduction

  2025-04-01

  book-chapterSenior author

  This Introduction to Volume Two of the three-volume set of Decolonial Reconstellations elaborates on the conceptual coordinates of deep time and deep place laid out in the Introduction to Volume One, while further sharpening the intertwined decolonial practices of historical critique and creative re-vision. As the co-editors note, because the authors here take the dynamisms of deep-time worlds as starting points, they re-approach the dismantling of colonialist narratives and concepts with fresh leverage. Their challenges to eurocentric temporalities also expose how “denials of coevalness” among peoples (Fabian) persist within standard concepts of premodern and modern, or “advanced” and “backward.” As the authors shed light on histories submerged or voided by colonialist narratives, to use Édouard Glissant’s term, they also open pathways for recuperating or re-imagining the past, present, and future. As the Introduction summarizes, the chapters’ grounding in periods before European hegemony accomplishes several things: it strengthens the provincializing of Europe; it pinpoints the colonialist, capitalist, and intersectional conjunctures that plague anti-colonial struggle; and, in turn, it provides an enriched basis for delinking from the colonial imaginaries and hegemonic assumptions that infect world politics today. The Introduction closes with an overview of the chapters.

  PublisherDOI

• Dissolving Master Narratives

  2025-04-01 · 1 citations

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Conceptual Introduction

  2025-04-01

  book-chapterSenior author

  This Introduction to Volume Three of the three-volume set of Decolonial Reconstellations builds on the frameworks outlined in the Introductions to Volumes One and Two. The editors particularly reflect on this Volume’s attention to the identity politics that today divide communities and disrupt the potential flourishing of just societies. As the co-editors highlight, the chapters expose the ongoing (neo)colonialist manipulation and polarization of identities, and yet these chapters also reveal how the non-essential nature of identity allows for its decolonial re-imaginings and creative adaptations. Like the chapters in the other volumes, the authors’ long-historical analyses enrich current theorizations of the these dynamics by studying the accruing layers of conjunctural or contested identity formations within regions and over centuries, which are manipulated by empires yet also creatively re-constellated by communities. The Introduction proposes that the complexities of these identity legacies need unpacking within the decolonizing project—not least because contemporary eurocentric discourses of international politics often reduce them to “tribal animosities.” Such reifications enable presentist, eurocentric, and androcentric norms to persist as the measure of identities, while obscuring the diverse identity values embedded within political economies. Informed by this volume’s chapters, this Introduction invites fresh public reflection on identities as multivalent forces in worldly life and world politics, and it closes with an overview of chapters.

  PublisherDOI

• Conceptual Introduction

  2025-04-01

  book-chapterSenior author

  This Introduction to Volume One lays out the aims, methods, and spirit of the three-volume project of Decolonial Reconstellations, followed by an overview of the chapters in this volume. The editors define the project’s key concepts, particularly the frameworks of deep time and deep place; and they describe the collaborative practices and long-historical, interdisciplinary, intersectional methods that shape the chapters’ contributions to decolonial thought. The Introduction emphasizes that, by de-linking from urocentric concepts and from temporalities of modern and premodern, while also eschewing colonially imposed divisions among peoples and regions, these chapters open new horizons for decolonial understanding and analysis. As the editors conclude, the combined contributions of differently positioned scholars from Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, and from southern, eastern, northern, and western hemispheres, allow the chapters to: broaden the double decolonial project of critique and re-envisioning; deepen feminist-intersectional analyses of world history; and build solidarities across positionalities, within and beyond the academy.

  PublisherDOI

• Land, Poverty and Human Development in Kenya

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2021-09-20 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The question of poverty has become central to the work of development economists in the last decade and a half. The 2000 World Development Report was entitled Attacking Poverty and the UN held a series of World Conferences in the 1990s, all of which addressed in some form or fashion the problem of poverty. Despite this and because of limited data there has been relatively little empirical work at the household level on determinants of poverty in Africa generally and Kenya specifically. In the few econometric studies that have been done for Kenya land has not been a significant determinant of poverty. This is a surprising result for a country where 80 per cent of the population depends on agriculture. Further the little that has been done has not incorporated the role of human development in the determination of poverty. Via an examination of a nationwide sample this paper will examine the role that land and social capital play in determining households poverty status in rural Kenya in addition to the standard theorized determinants.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Small and as Productive : Female Headed Households and the Inverse Relationship between Land Size and Output in Kenya

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2021-09-20 · 11 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Access to land and particularly its distribution has reemerged as an important part of both academic and policy discussions in the last decade, leading to the resuscitation of the debate on the relationship between size of holdings and output per land unit. Across the world, studies have suggested the existence of a decreasing relationship between land size and output per unit of land. The most-widely accepted explanation for this relationship is that households with smaller holdings tend to be labor rich relative to land, and therefore can achieve higher output through the increased application of labor. Despite the rich literature on this topic there has been little work on whether this relationship is valid for female-headed households, particularly in the case of African countries. Past African studies have found female-headed households to be smaller by close to one adult in comparison to male-headed households. Given this difference one would expect there to be a difference in the outcome of land redistribution for different types of households, ceteris paribus. Additionally, the aggregate impact in African countries could be substantial, as female-headed households comprise in several cases up to 30 percent of the rural households. In this paper we will examine empirically whether the inverse size and output relationship is different between female and male headed households in the case of Kenya, using the Kenya Integrated Household Budget and Expenditure Survey of 2006, which includes modules on agricultural holdings and agricultural output in addition to the standard demographic characteristics. By controlling for the endogeneity of crop choice and fertilizer use we are able to find that cash crop production and human capital, and not differences in household size, determines the differences in male and female headed land productivity. Hence, our study goes beyond the simple discussion of the inverse relationship between land size and output per unit and the potential impact of redistribution. Specifically we will be able to address the kind of broad rural development policies in addition to land redistribution that would allow female headed households to do at least as well as (if not better than) male headed households.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Robert Pollin

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  19 shared

• James Heintz

  19 shared

• Frank Holmquist

  3 shared

• Charalampos Konstantinidis

  3 shared

• Stephen Cullenberg

  3 shared

• Geoffrey Kironchi

  3 shared

• Richard N. Onwonga

  3 shared

• Cem Oyvat

  University of Greenwich

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• STRIDE FELLOW – University of Massachusetts-Amherst (2021-22…
• Lilly Teaching Fellow - University of Massachusetts-Amherst,…
• Selected Grants (e.g., Andrew Mellon Foundation Grant, Mello…