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 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.

This thesis was carried out within the project ImGoats, a project led by ILRI and implemented by CARE in Mozambique, aiming at increasing the incomes and food security of poor smallholders through innovations in the meat goat value chain. From a bottom-up approach, the project developed different interventions and this thesis was focusing on one of them, the implementation of communal grazing land for goats, land that was not currently in use.