A.M. Onencan, MSc

Abby Muricho Onencan is a Post-doctoral researcher in the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering with a focus on Design for Societal Sustainability. Abby works in the Sustainable Design Engineering Department, in the section Design for Sustainability. She joined IDE after successfully completing her PhD and post-doctorate studies in the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at the Delft University of Technology.

Abby is engaged in trans-disciplinary research at the Delft University of Technology under the ENRGISED project. The project objective is to make energy transition contagious in The Netherlands. Her role is primarily to develop an intervention strategy in which citizens mobilise each other and help make alternatives acceptable. This will include energy transition tools, a toolkit for general use, and a transition design framework. With local partners, this strategy and toolkit will be tested in field trials. Ultimately, this would result in social innovations that actualise the Netherlands’ commitment to discontinue natural gas use by 2050.

She is also a member of the Resilience Advisors Network (RAN), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the  American Geophysical Union (AGU), with more than 15 years professional experience in building societal resilience, research, policy development, and multilateral project management.

Abby has managed large multilateral research-related projects including the recently concluded EU project - Improving Disaster Risk Reduction in the Transcarpathian Region, Ukraine (ImProDiReT), where she conducted a comprehensive evaluation of institutional policies and legislations and a stakeholder risk evaluation with over 1500 respondents. She served as a team leader of a $4.5 million multilateral (11 countries) DFID project and a subsequent $1.5 million World Bank project (under the Cooperation in International Waters in Africa Programme). For over 4 years, she was based in Entebbe, Uganda as the project lead of eleven Nile Basin country offices (Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Egypt, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, DR Congo, Eritrea and Kenya), two sub-regional offices in Kigali, Rwanda and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Abby conducted regular monitoring and subsequent evaluation of numerous EU/EDF financed projects in eleven Kenyan local authorities under the Rural Poverty Reduction Programme. She also facilitated several international evaluations of the Nile Basin DFID project and the Nile Basin Trust Fund, in her capacity as the team leader of the Nile Basin Discourse.

She was seconded by UNDP as a Technical Advisor (TA) for the Kenyan Office of the President under the “Mainstreaming Results-Based Management (RBM) in the Public Service” program. This public service reform programme won many international awards including the 2007 UN Public Service Award for transparency and accountability. Due to UNDP’s intervention, Kenya moved up ten points in the World Bank Doing Business ranking in 2007 & 2008 and ranked amongst the top ten countries that simplified business start-up.

She has 9 years professional expertise in technical advisory (TA) positions, namely, EU ImProDiReT project, EU iTRACK project, Kenyan Judiciary under the Governance, Justice, Law and Order Programme, Kenyan Office of the President as a UNDP TA, and Kenyan Local Governments under the EU/EDF ACP Rural Poverty Reduction Programme.