Index Insurance to Enhance Productivity and Incomes for Small-scale Agricultural and Pastoral Households: The Livestock Insurance Pilot in Northern Kenya
Event Information
A Series on Integrating Climate Change & Natural Resource Management into Feed the Future #5
For many rural households, uninsured risk means that they can’t get ahead for falling behind. So if risk can make and keep households poor, can its removal via risk transfer mechanisms (insurance contracts) fundamentally alter agricultural growth and rural poverty dynamics by protecting productive assets and encouraging investment and technology adoption? The BASIS CRSP’s I4 Index Insurance Innovation Initiative is addressing this question with a set of pilot projects, including the Index-based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) project in Marsabit District in Northern Kenya. Launched commercially in 2010, the IBLI project designed a livestock mortality insurance contract based on satellite imagery. After reviewing the core logic of insurance as a tool for agricultural development and food security, the speakers summarized the IBLI contract and reported on what they have learned—and what they hope to learn—about the impact of risk transfer instruments on growth and poverty dynamics.
About This Series
The Feed the Future Guide recognizes that "[e]nvironmental degradation and climate change are critical cross-cutting issues that can affect the sustainability of investments in agricultural development and food security, impede long-term economic growth, and adversely affect livelihoods and well being." This event series, "Integrating Climate Change and Natural Resource Management into Feed the Future," will seek to articulate some of the challenges and opportunities that integration of these issues poses, and present successful program approaches and tools for working across the disciplines of climate change, natural resource management, and food security. The series will share relevant tools, lessons learned, and recommend best practices in the areas of soil, water, nutrition, and climate change resilience and will seek to raise the profile of these cross-cutting issues and their critical linkages to food security.
Speakers
Chris Barrett
Cornell University
Chris Barrett is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management and International Professor of Agriculture in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University where he also serves as the David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future’s Associate Director for Economic Development Programs and the Director of the Cornell Institute for International Food, Agriculture and Development’s initiative on Stimulating Agricultural and Rural Transformation. He holds degrees from Princeton (A.B. 1984), Oxford (M.S. 1985) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (dual Ph.D. 1994). At Cornell, he teaches undergraduate courses on Contemporary Controversies in the Global Economy and Comparative Perspective on Poverty Reduction Policy, as well as graduate courses on the Microeconomics of International Development and Food Systems and Poverty Reduction. Professor Barrett has published or in press 13 books and more than 215 journal articles and book chapters. He has been principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on more than $24 million in extramural research grants from the National Science Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Rockefeller Foundation, USAID and other sponsors. He has supervised more than 55 graduate students and post-docs, many of whom are now on leading faculties and in research institutes worldwide. He served as editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics from 2003-2008, is presently as an associate editor or editorial board member of the African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, the Egerton (Kenya) Journal of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, the European Review of Agricultural Economics, Food Security, the Journal of African Economies, the Journal of Agribusiness in Developing and Emerging Economies, the Journal of Development Studies and World Development, and was previously President of the Association of Christian Economists. He has served on a variety of boards and has won several university, national and international awards for teaching, research and public outreach. In 2010, Professor Barrett was elected a Fellow both of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and of the African Association of Agricultural Economists. He, his wife and their five children live in Lansing, NY.
Michael Carter
University of California—Davis
Michael Carter is professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of California--Davis. He is also director of the BASIS Assets and Market Access Collaborative Research Support Program (AMA CRSP) that studies rural poverty alleviation strategies in Africa, Asia and Latin American. Author of numerous articles and books, Carter's research focuses on the nature of growth and transformation in low income economies, giving particular attention to how inequality in the distribution of assets shape, and are shaped by, economic growth. While working primarily through the econometric analyses of household and firm level data, Carter has also made theoretical contributions on the economics of asset accumulation, institutional innovation and credit rationing. He carried out the fieldwork for his dissertation on the Peruvian land reform in 1980, and has since had numerous other research projects in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Carter has been working on South African income distribution dynamics since 1994 when he joined a team analyzing a national living standards survey. His current projects include analysis of poverty dynamics and productive social safety nets, and feature a suite of projects that design, pilot and evaluate index insurance contracts as mechanisms to alleviate chronic poverty and deepen agricultural and rural financial markets. Under the BASIS AMA CRSP, Dr. Carter has recently launched the Index Insurance Innovation Initiative (I4) an effort to understand when, where and how best to use index insurance as a tool for development.
Andrew Mude
International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)
A Kenyan national, Dr. Andrew Mude pursued his undergraduate degree in Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania. In 1999, he graduated summa cum laude with a major in Economics and a minor in Mathematics and French. In 2000, Mude joined Cornell University in New York in pursuit of his doctoral degree in Economics with a concentration in development economics and applied econometrics. During his graduate studies, Mude spent time as a research assistant for the USAID funded PARIMA (Pastoralist Risk Management) activity under the Global Livestock CRSP. He also carried out an internship at ILRI in which he developed an empirical model to forecast the welfare impact of impending drought on a largely pastoral population. As part of his dissertation research, Mude also spent six-months in the field studying coffee producers and their cooperatives in Murang’a district, Kenya. For this effort he won the silver medal at the 2007 Global Development Network. He graduated with his PhD in June, 2006.
Mude joined ILRI in August 2006 as an Economist at ILRIs Targeting and Innovations Program. At ILRI his first flagship project was as a PI for the World Bank funded Kenya Adaptation to Climate Change in the Arid Lands. Mude led the ILRI team in the collaborative research and development effort that resulted in the launch of the Marsabit Index Based Livestock Insurance contract. His current portfolio deals largely with researching and designing risk-management and development interventions to help increase resilience and reduce vulnerability amongst poor livestock-dependent households, particularly in pastoral areas.