This study develops an index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) product for managing key livestock asset risks of pastoralists in the arid and semi-arid lands of northern Kenya, where insurance markets are effectively absent and uninsured risk exposure is a main cause of persistent poverty.

This paper describes an action research process undertaken with four African agricultural carbon projects—CARE’s Sustainable Agriculture in Changing Climate Initiative in Western Kenya; World Vision’s Assisted Natural Regeneration Project in Humbo, Ethiopia; Vi Agroforestry’s Western Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project; and ECOTRUST’s Trees for Global Benefits in Uganda—to explore their institutional changes as project managers and communities work to build local capacity for project management.

Recently, the development and humanitarian relief communities have directed attention to building resilience of pastoral communities to droughts and other shocks. While resilience thinking has much to offer, using resilience as a framework for investing in disaster risk reduction and development faces numerous challenges. Development implies that people are actively changing, which poses the question of whether such changes are adaptations or transformations, or whether this is a subjective or academic distinction.

This filmed interview of Hassan Bashir, group chief executive of Takaful Africa Group, was prepared for the ILRI-World Bank Group side event at the Borlaug Dialogue, Des Moines, Iowa, 12 October 2016.

This paper describes a novel effort at developing index-based insurance for locationaveraged livestock mortality as a means to fill an important void in the risk management instruments available to protect the main asset of pastoralists in the arid and semi-arid lands of Kenya, where insurance markets are effectively absent and uninsured risk exposure is a main cause of the existence of poverty traps.