Nicholas Kilimani is a former staff of the World Bank. He is a Lecturer in the Department of Policy & Development Economics, School of Economics-Makerere University and a Research Fellow at the Environment for Development Research Centre (EfD-Mak) at Makerere University. He is a Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Rutgers State University of New Jersey. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and currently a Research Associate at the Public Economics and Environmental Research Centre, School of Economics, University of Johannesburg. He is a former Matasa Fellow, and previously a Guest Scholar at the Nordic Africa Institute, University of Uppsala-Sweden. He is Water and Society (WaSo) Fellow of the Norwegian Programme for Capacity Building in Higher Education and Research for Development (NORHED) and former Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway.

His career path has been in the realm of research and policy and the academia, starting with his employment with the Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC), a leading policy research Think-tank in Uganda, and later into university teaching and research, technical support to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), and the World Bank. He continues to provide technical support to different Institutions in the research and policy arena both Government and Non-government within and outside Uganda. He is a Member of the African Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative (SETI) research network, Uganda Economics Association, the Partnership for Economic Policy, Water and Society, the Global Development Network (GDNet) and the African Economic Research Consortium.

His career revolves around research and policy, and he has a track-record in Consultancy on issues in the realm of environment and economic development. His policy research focuses on impact evaluation & learning in collaborative settings on a wide variety of policies, and socioeconomic interactions with respect to the management and use of natural resources, labour markets dynamics, effects of policy and other socioeconomic variables on social welfare, impact evaluation analysis in agriculture, microfinance, health and education. He has experience in the field of agricultural development and rural finance in Uganda, Malawi, Bangladesh, Ghana, and Rwanda. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics of the University of Pretoria.