Compensation for people in different roles in the research partnership and process is a challenging and sometimes ethically ambiguous practice. The 2024 program paid particular attention to the costs (financial and intangible) that volunteer researchers from the Lamu Youth Alliance bear to participate in the partnership. Our experience brought to light the importance of increasing transparency around remuneration sums and distribution, as well as increasing compensation to better align with the time commitment and cost of living in Kenya. Additionally, the fact that women with caretaking responsibilities faced the greatest challenges to participation and that the 2025 version of the program will consist of all female research teams illustrates the necessity to continually learn, adapt, and adjust budgets to create greater transparency and more just remuneration practices.

“My biggest challenge was the money paid was not sufficient due to the living cost in Kenya being high at the moment.”
– LYA member

While all research teams learned and worked towards upholding their primary responsibility to research participants and interlocuters, financial compensation for information was a challenging terrain to navigate, shaped by competing ethical obligations, culturally specific norms of exchange, solicitations for assistance, and other context-specific challenges. Research teams were taught current best practices in anthropological field research (which rarely finds appropriate instances for paying informants or interlocuters) and significant space was dedicated to discussing the stakes, advantages, and disadvantages of monetary compensation in research in general and expectations in Lamu in particular. Ultimately, the decision to compensate or not (or rather, how to compensate participants fairly), was left to each research team. Many found that indirect forms of compensation for the time of particular interlocuters in specific positions (often in the form of some refreshment or transport fare) were responsive to the reciprocal and collaborative relationships they sought to foster. The question of remuneration in research is just that – a question; one that relies on context-specific considerations, and requires thorough and insightful justification for whichever answer or solution is proposed. In this way, the partnership curates a sensibility and responsibility to upholding research ethics as student researchers experience different dilemmas and work together to resolve them in ways that avoid harm, uphold the voluntarism of participation, and build trust.