Livestock insurance scheme developed by pastoralists in partnership with the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is helping Kenyan herders to protect their marketable assets.

The new book on markets development for African small holder farmers published in Nairobi on Wednesday has highlighted a pioneering livestock insurance project as a key innovation that could enable African farmers reduce their losses in crop and livestock production.

“It will not be enough to simply produce more food from the fields and grazing lands of Africa,” warns the new book, which is published by ILRI and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

A statement from ILRI said more effort is needed to create better markets and improve access to these markets’ especially in remote regions.

Read more ….. Africa news: Kenya Focus.  Special report by XINHUA correspondent: Christine Lagat – May 4 -10, 2012

Index-Based Livestock Insurance enables a private insurance company to create policies for northern Kenya’s herders. (John Warburton-Lee/Awl Images/Getty Images)

Camels mean cash in Kenya. But severe drought routinely kills off livestock, and families go bankrupt, unless they have an innovative insurance plan.

Brenda Wandera’s iPhone buzzes in her lap. A text message has made its way through the blurry heat of Kenya’s Chalbi Desert, and it changes her next move. “As soon as we get to Kalacha, we have to go to Network,” she says.

Go to Network, I wonder. That must be a Kenyan turn of phrase for “finding a cell tower.”

I’ve been warned that Kalacha is off the grid, which would make it one of the more remote corners of Africa, where mobile-phone and Internet service in even far-flung villages can be stronger and more regular than in parts of the American Southwest or Appalachia. Indeed, Kalacha is isolated. It sits in northern Kenya, about 40 miles from the border with Ethiopia, just at the edge of the Chalbi. Rounded huts of thatched grass zigzag across dry land. The horizon is dark and bulbous and looks very, very far away.

Our Land Cruiser drives toward one of those bulbs, a massive mound of volcanic rocks. Wandera hops out of the car, clutching her iPhone, and springs up the uneven hillock, 30 or so feet tall. At the top, a half dozen local women huddle on one edge. Their abayas — lemon-yellow, tomato-red, sequined garments — look especially colorful against the monochrome flatlands stretched out below. They chat on cell phones tucked under their tightly pulled scarves.

Read more….. by Jina Moore,  Miller Mc Cune (Feb 2012)

A village meeting in Dirib Gombo for farmers who took out livestock insurance to receive their first payout after a prolonged drought in the region. Credit: Neil Palmer/ CIAT

Marsabit District — The first thing that hits a visitor to Ginda village in northern Kenya is the smell.

Farmer Haro Sora’s land is littered with the carcasses of cattle and donkeys that have collapsed following an intense, prolonged drought. A skull here; half a ribcage there. In some places there are whole animals slumped on the roadside.

Ginda, in Marsabit District, has been hit by the Horn of Africa drought. It triggered a food crisis affecting around 13 million people in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, by the time the rains finally returned to Ginda after more than a year.

The fact that the food crisis in the Horn was the result of a livestock crisis has been well documented. The area is a major pastoralist zone. When vegetation for grazing began to dry-up and livestock started to die, the knock-on effects on farmer livelihoods became strikingly clear.

Some observers balk at the idea of a financial institution selling insurance to already cash-strapped smallholder farmers to protect them against the risk of drought. The 650 livestock keepers in Marsabit, who are delighted to be receiving their first payouts, might give critics pause.

Sake Dabasso Halake stands proudly in front of Equity Bank’s Marsabit branch. She smiles, clutching an envelope filled with 16,000 Kenyan shillings that she just received. It was her insurance payout for the 10 cows she lost during the drought.

The Index-Based Livestock Insurance scheme is run by the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in collaboration with several technical partners, the government of Kenya and commercial partners UAP Insurance and Equity Bank. The project is funded by UKAID, USAID and the World Bank, among others.

Read more …..

Sake Dabasso Halake with her recent livestock insurance payout, which was made in northern Kenya’s Marsabit District following the great drought that afflicted the Horn of Africa in the latter half of 2011 (photo credit: Jeff Haskins/Burness Communications).

Laurie Goering, a reporter for AlertNet writing from the United Nations climate change meetings in Durban this week, says that pioneering insurance projects are giving remote pastoral livestock herders a way to reduce the risks they face from a changing climate that presents recurring, dramatically severe, droughts.

‘Equipping illiterate migratory herders with drought insurance in one of the driest regions of drought-prone East Africa might seem a big task, particularly in a region where claims adjustors, cell phone coverage and cash to pay for policies are nearly as rare as rain itself.

‘But a range of such pioneering insurance efforts – considered one of the few ways to help East Africa’s herders weather worsening droughts – are taking hold in Kenya and Ethiopia, and are now being replicated as far away as Peru and Guatemala.

Read more …. ILRI clippings by Susan Macmillan, Dec 2011

A Kenyan nomadic herder walks near camels drinking water at a point in the northeastern town of El Wak, close to the Somalia and Kenya border, February 6, 2009. REUTERS/Antony Njuguna

DURBAN, South Africa (AlertNet) – Equipping illiterate migratory herders with drought insurance in one of the driest regions of drought-prone East Africa might seem a big task, particularly in a region where claims adjustors, cell phone coverage and cash to pay for policies are nearly as rare as rain itself.

But a range of such pioneering insurance efforts – considered one of the few ways to help East Africa’s herders weather worsening droughts – are taking hold in Kenya and Ethiopia, and are now being replicated as far away as Peru and Guatemala.

“(Herders) are fantastic risk managers. All they lack is the tools to do it even better,” said Richard Choularton, a senior policy officer focusing on climate change and disaster risk reduction for the World Food Programme (WFP).

Equipping them with insurance “keeps households above the poverty line so they don’t enter this downward spiral” when bad times hit – a key way of helping them adapt to climate change, he said during an explanation of insurance programmes at the United Nations’ climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

In Kenya’s northern Marsabit district, near the border with Somalia and Ethiopia, the landscape is so dry that herding animals – camels and goats in the parched north, cattle in the slightly lusher south – is the only option for most people to make a living.

Long accustomed to dealing with drought, herders have traditional ways of coping, including moving animals to distant pastures, selling some for cash to reduce herds and build reserves when drought strikes, loaning animals to those who have lost their herds and, in some cases, raiding neighbours’ herds to restock.

But worsening droughts – believed to be linked to climate change – mean many of those traditional mechanisms are no longer effective, and growing numbers of families are slipping into hunger and worsening poverty.

MICRO-INSURANCE

Insurance – or more specifically index-based micro-insurance – offers a way to help prevent that, its backers say.

Under most programmes, pastoralists are offered a chance to insure a portion or all of their animals against losses to drought. The average annual cost of a policy in Marsabit district is about $5 to $8, according to Brenda Wandera, who works on livestock-based index insurance programmes there for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

Read More …. Alertnet // Laurie Goering , 30 Nov 2011

A livestock carcass in Marsabit ,Northern Kenya, which has suffered prolonged drought. Credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT)

Herdsmen in drought-stricken Kenya have received their first payments from an innovative livestock insurance program designed with the help of Michael Carter, a professor of agricultural and resource economics.

The program, intended to prevent livestock producers from falling into indigence and food-aid dependence, could be a model for improving food security in other areas of the world.

Read more…. UC Davis Friday update, 18 Nov 2011

A livestock carcass in Marsabit ,Northern Kenya, which has suffered prolonged drought. Credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT)

“Sixty of our cattle died this year out of 120, 17 more were taken by raiders, but the main reason? It is hunger and weakness that kills them. It is the drought.”

At the center of Sora’s family compound, demarcated by thorn bushes, is a circular mud-walled hut; outside the plot, crumpled over rocks, are the desiccated carcasses of some of the family’s depleted herd, left to rot where they fell.

“It is a disaster for us,” said Sora’s 56-year old father Haro, a forlorn man who lost his right eye to disease years ago. “We have no hope.”

Pastoralists in the Horn of Africa have been hardest-hit by the drought that is ravaging the region. More than 12 million people are short of food and in the parts of Somalia where drought has worsened into famine, 750,000 people face starvation, according to United Nations figures.

Read more…… By Tristan McConnell, Global post (Nov 2011)

Farmer Haro Sora’s land is littered with the carcasses of cattle and donkeys that have keeled over following an intense, prolonged drought. A skull here; half a ribcage there. In some places there are whole animals slumped on the roadside. Some have died in the last few days, and the wind does little to clear the air.

Ginda, in Marsabit District, has been affected by the now infamous Horn of Africa drought, which triggered a food crisis affecting around 13 million people in Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia. After more than a year, the rains finally returned to Ginda a fortnight ago.

The fact that the food crisis in the Horn was the result of a livestock crisis has been well documented. A major pastoralist zone, when vegetation for grazing began to dry-up and livestock started to die, the knock-on effects on farmer livelihoods became strikingly clear.

Read more…. CIAT blog by Neil (24th Oct 2011)

Insured cattle farmers in Kenya are now receiving their first payment for losing animals to drought. Photo: P. Casier (CGIAR)

Herders in Northern Kenya who have lost their cattle due to the intensive drought are getting their first payments as part of an innovative insurance program known as Index Based Livestock Insurance or IBLI. This was reported by the International Livestock Research Institute who developed this insurance programme together with Cornell University and the Index Insurance Innovation Initiative program at the University of California at Davis.

Read more… CCAFS blog by Cecilia (21st Oct 2011)

Some 650 insured herders in northern Kenya’s vast Marsabit District benefited from this innovative programme that promises to change the fate of pastoralists living in the arid and semi-arid areas and who face periodic lose of their herds due to drought. “It’s terrible that we are seeing this level of loss but gratifying that the policies are doing what they are supposed to do, which is to help herders avert disaster when weather conditions dry up pasture lands and animals begin to perish,” said Isaac Magina, Head of Agriculture Insurance, UAP Insurance.

Known as Index Based Livestock Insurance or ILBI, payouts are triggered when satellite images show that grazing lands in the region have deteriorated to the point that herders are expected to be losing greater than 15 percent of their herd. The current readings upon which indemnities are now being paid show that between 18 to 33 percent of livestock have been lost to drought this season.

Read more…. AfricaNews.com (21st Oct 2011)