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 report describes an emergency drought mitigation program executed by the non-governmental organization (NGO) Vétérinaires Sans Frontières Belgium (VSF-Belgium) in Turkana District, northwestern Kenya, in early 2005. It consisted of purchasing drought-affected goats from pastoralists in the worse affected parts of the district and donating them to local schools and health centres, where the resulting meat was to be used to supplement the diet of students and in-patients.

This article describes a novel index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) product piloted among pastoralists in Northern Kenya, where insurance markets are effectively absent and uninsured risk exposure is a main cause of poverty. We describe the methodology used to design the contract and its underlying index of predicted area-average livestock mortality, established statistically using longitudinal observations of household-level herd mortality fit to remotely sensed vegetation data.