Mustapha Mohammed Suraj (ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6484-2299) is a Research Assistant in the Socio-economics Section of the CSIR–Savanna Agricultural Research Institute (CSIR-SARI), Tamale, Ghana, with approximately eight years of professional research experience. He holds a BSc in Agribusiness from the University for Development Studies and an MPhil in Agribusiness from the University of Ghana.

He is an incoming doctoral student in the five-year Global Governance Program (G-cube) at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), Japan, where he has been awarded the Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholarship. His doctoral training and research are oriented towards development economics, with particular emphasis on agricultural development, policy evaluation and applied microeconomics.

His current research examines the adoption and welfare effects of agroecological practices, incentive-based agricultural extension, food and nutrition security, industrial policy and firm performance, and the influence of local economic development on women’s sectoral employment transitions in sub-Saharan Africa. His proposed doctoral research uses a randomized controlled trial to investigate whether incentive-based interventions for agricultural extension agents can improve farmers’ adoption of recommended agronomic practices, agricultural productivity and household welfare.

He has experience in quantitative and qualitative research, impact evaluation, survey design and implementation, data quality assurance, monitoring, evaluation and learning, and technical report writing. He is proficient in Stata, SPSS, Microsoft Office, KoboCollect, ODK, SurveyCTO, Google Forms and other computer-assisted data-collection and management applications.