The increasing frequency and severity of drought and other climate shocks in the developing world’s great drylands threaten the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of poor food producers, driving many into chronic poverty. Although livestock are among the most important assets to poor households in the drylands, and their loss often traps families in long-lasting poverty, little systematic research has focused on interventions to support development of dryland pastoral systems.

Excluding Antarctica, rangelands make up about 70% of the Earth’s surface and Africa’s arid and semi-arid lands, which are used predominately for extensive livestock grazing, comprise nearly half of the continent’s land mass. Most of the Horn of Africa gravely afflicted by drought in 2011 is made up of the drier drylands (0–300 mm of rainfall a year), where livestock production dominates livelihoods.

Despite the recurring specter of drought and famine in the Horn of Africa, pastoral herding usually works well over the longer term, with nomadic farming, for example, about 20% more productive than ranching in terms of annual calf and milk production. The pastoral livestock sector is not only productive and critical to food security but also an optimal way to manage and maintain drylands and the livelihoods of those who live off them.

Livestock enterprises are not only a major source of income for people living in and off drylands, but also provide up to 50% of the agricultural gross domestic product of African countries and much of the meat and milk consumed in these countries: 90% of the meat consumed in East Africa, for example, comes from pastoral herds. Rangelands are productive—and potentially very productive. They are good filters of water, support much of the world’s remaining wildlife diversity and sequester carbon. Governments and donors looking for long-term solutions to drought-induced food insecurity should bear in mind that across much of the world’s vast drylands, herding rather than cropping is the only viable and sustainable form of food production possible.

Despite the productivity, and the great productive potential, of the world’s drylands, pastoralism is often still criticized as a backward mode of production that keeps people in poverty, degrades land and diminishes wildlife. Such views have tended to favour government policies that attempt to change viable pastoral production systems into inappropriate ranching or settled agriculture schemes.

Expert opinion agrees that the best way to tap into the potential of the drylands is to build on the foundation of their livestock economies rather than ignoring them or seeking to replace them. This will demand more judicious land-use policies, better roads, functioning livestock markets, and better access by pastoral communities to information and services, among other developments. Promising livestock options for dryland herders include support for migratory herding, pastoral insurance and payments for environmental services.

Discover more about this topic:

• News, updates, stories
• Photos
• Presentations
• Publications
• IBLI project
• Find out more on the ILRI website

A boy and a woman struggle with the dusty wind looking for water in Wajir, Kenya (photo on Flickr by Jervis Sundays, Kenya Red Cross Society).

Today, for the first time in Africa, an insurance policy that combines an Islamic-compliant financial instrument with innovative use of satellite imagery is compensating Muslim pastoralists for drought-induced losses suffered in Kenya’s northeastern Wajir County, where livestock are valued at Ksh46 billion (USD550 million).

Thirty women and 71 men in arid and semi-arid Wajir are the first beneficiaries of livestock insurance that conforms to the Islamic concept of takaful, in which risks are shared among a group of participants. Through a contract called tabbaru (donation), participants make contributions to a risk fund. In the case of a payout, which happened today, the fund makes payments commensurate with the contributions received.

The pilot program is paying approximately Ksh500,000 (USD5,800) for losses suffered to their herds of sheep, goat, cattle and camels during the long dry season that typically ends in March.

The herds were insured last August by Takaful Insurance of Africa (TIA) with an Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) product, branded as Index-Based Livestock Takaful (IBLT).

IBLI uses satellite imagery—measuring the conditions of grazing lands—that is fed into an algorithm that predicts livestock loses. Predictions beyond the 15-percent level trigger indemnity payments. Drought conditions in much of Wajir County have surpassed the index trigger and active contract holders in these areas were compensated today.

This payout is critical for building confidence in the concept of insurance for the pastoral, drought-prone regions of East Africa, where life revolves around livestock and droughts can bring disaster,” said Andrew Mude, who leads the IBLI program of the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

It’s particularly important to make livestock policies work for places like Wajir,” he added, “where many thought the combination of isolation from economic activity and the vast, remote areas covered by pastoralist herders made protecting livestock assets with market-mediated insurance products impossible.”

Dead and dying animals at Dambas, in the Arbajahan area of Wajir District, in northeastern Kenya, which in the mid-1990s dried up due to successive years of very little rain; Africa’s climates have always been erratic but there is evidence that global warming is increasing droughts, floods and climate uncertainty and unpredictability (photo on Flickr by Brendan Cox / Oxfam).

ILRI works in collaboration with a wide array of partners in this program that include the government of the Republic of Kenya, Cornell University and the Index Insurance Innovation Initiative (I4), among many others.

ILRI and partners want to see livestock insurance available throughout East Africa, where an estimated 70 million people live in drylands, many of them making their living by herding animals. In Kenya alone, the pastoral livestock sector is estimated to be worth at least USD5 billion. The eight-nation Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) estimates that over 90 percent of the meat consumed in East Africa comes from pastoral herds.

So far, about 4,000 pastoralists in northern Kenya, not all of them Muslim, have bought IBLI contracts since the project launched in 2010, an indication that there is both interest in and demand for livestock insurance.

Our goal is to show pastoralists that they can use a fair and ethical business model to protect their assets from a natural hazard of keeping livestock in East Africa,” said Hassan Bashir, the CEO of Nairobi-based Takaful Insurance, whose father is a client and received a payout today.

Takaful earns a management fee from participants who pay contributions to become members of a fund or risk pool. The pool receives contributions and makes payments when the contract pays out. If a surplus results, it is distributed equitably to those members who are not recipients of the payout.

Experts at ILRI say that in semi-arid and arid regions, insurance can make keeping livestock a more effective and sustainable livelihood strategy and can act as a cushion to household assets and income in times of distress. Initial studies from other pastoral regions that have access to the IBLT product showed that droughts were less likely to damage diets in households that had bought insurance. The insurance also was linked to a 50 percent drop in distress sales of livestock and a 33 percent drop in reliance on food aid.

The IBLI program in Kenya is funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), the Government of Australia and the European Union.

Sixty-three-year-old Yarey Abdi iIobe lives in Shabantaabaq Village (the name means ‘five acacia trees’), in Wajir District, in the northeast corner of Kenya’s vast drylands. In 2001, the village had not seen rain in two and a half years and some 80% of its cattle died as a result (photo on Flickr by Oxfam East Africa).

ILRI researchers note that making livestock insurance commercially viable in East Africa will require catalyzing a critical mass of informed demand. They acknowledge this will be a challenge in a region where many herders occupy vast remote areas where communication and transport are difficult. But some experts believe the potential to protect pastoralists from drought and help them improve their herds justifies support from governments and donors, just as agriculture insurance is often subsidized in many countries across the globe.

We saw what Wajir was like in 2011 when the worst drought in decades killed almost half the livestock in the region and lives were left hanging in the balance,” said Liesbeth Zonneveld, country director of Mercy Corps, an organization that is a partner in the IBLT project. “Today we see a situation where drought remains a threat, but people have a way to protect their central source of food and income.

ILRI Director General Jimmy Smith said the success of the IBLI program is evidence that pastoralists in Africa are as receptive as livestock keepers anywhere to options for managing risk.

These are people who over the centuries have learned how to nurture herds in some of the most challenging conditions in the world,” Smith said. “They may not have encountered livestock insurance before, but they have quickly understood how it can help bring a new level of stability to the pastoralist way of life.

The Index-Based Livestock Takaful (IBLT) is a brand of the Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) project developed in partnership by ILRI, Cornell University and Index Insurance Innovation Initiative (I4) at the University of California at Davis. The ILRI-led IBLI and IBLT projects are part of ILRI’s Livelihoods, Gender and Impact Program and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security. Further information on the wider program agenda is available at www.ilri.org/ibli.

Takaful Insurance of Africa Limited (TIA) is a dynamic insurance company responsible for pioneering the Takaful concept, a new and ethical perspective to the insurance industry in Kenya and the region. http://www.takafulafrica.com/

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) works with partners worldwide to improve food and nutritional security and to reduce poverty in developing countries through research on efficient, safe and sustainable use of livestock—ensuring better lives through livestock. The products generated by ILRI and its partners help people in developing countries enhance their livestock-dependent livelihoods, health and environments. ILRI is a member of the CGIAR Consortium of 15 research centres working for a food-secure future. ILRI has its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, a second principal campus in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and other offices in Southern and West Africa and South, Southeast and East Asia.

Read more about ILRI’s Index-Based Livestock Insurance Project
Index-Based Livestock Insurance Blog

ILRI Clippings Blog
Livestock keepers in Kenya’s northern Isiolo District to get livestock-drought insurance for first time, 30 Jul 2013

ILRI News Blog
ILRI films on research helping Africa’s small-scale livestock keepers better adapt to changing climates, 13 Jan 2014
‘Livestock insurance project an excellent example of innovative risk management in Kenya’s arid lands’—Kenyan minister, 10 Sep 2012
Options to enhance resilience in pastoral systems: The case for novel livestock insurance, 22 Feb 2012
Short films document first index-based livestock insurance for African herders, 26 Oct 2011
Livestock director and partners launch first-ever index-based livestock insurance payments in Africa, 25 Oct 2011
Herders in drought-stricken northern Kenya get first livestock insurance payments, 21 Oct 2011

 Arid drylands landscape near Niassante, Senegal (photo: ILRI/Jo Cadilhon).

Two weeks ago, I travelled with partners from the Platform on Pastoralism and Drylands of the French Research Centre for Agricultural Development (Le Pôle pastoralisme et zones sèches CIRAD-PPZS) to the shores of the Senegal River at the border between Senegal and Mauritania. It was excruciatingly hot and dry. We drank warm water constantly (our plastic-bottled mineral water turned hot from the heat in the car by 11am). Physical or intellectual activity of any kind made between 11am and 4.30pm was demanding. For me, this was just a three-day glimpse of the living conditions of Sahelian pastoralist communities. I can now relate better to the livelihood challenges they face in such a hostile environment.

The rains come only once a year here, whereupon the land turns lush green with grass. But for 9 months out of 12, the land is dry and barren. Cropping is possible only along the irrigated perimeters south of the Senegal River. So itinerant livestock herding has been the only way to make a living in this arid rural environment.

In 2006 the Laiterie du Berger started operating a dairy plant in Richard Toll City, in northern Senegal, to collect and add value to milk from local herders and help meet increasing demand for milk products in Dakar and other large cities of the country. This involves collecting milk from pastoralist campsites. To limit the amount of time fresh milk is being transported unchilled on dirt roads, the dairy has encouraged milk producers to become more sedentary. The new dairy marketing outlet has thus helped provoke profound changes in the local dairy production system, with women and children now remaining in semi-permanent camps with the producing dairy cows, where they receive animal feed from the dairy so as to sustain their cows’ milk production, while the men of the community continue their pastoral ways, moving their herds of bulls and non-lactating cows to new areas as needed in search of water and forage.

Thanks to a small grant from the CGIAR Standing Panel on Impact Assessment, which complemented funding from the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions and Markets, ILRI and its partners have developed a method to help measure the social impacts of this new dairy supply chain innovation on these pastoralist societies. Our method relies on use of the following three tools.

1. A food security indicator calculated with data on the nutritional practices of 450 pastoralist herders supplying the dairy; these data were part of a survey conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), CIRAD and Professionnels du développement solidaire (Professionals for Fair Development, GRET)
2. In-depth interviews with 70 other pastoralist herders to understand better their business relationships with the Laiterie du Berger
3. Focus group discussions with 20 women dairy farmers (which always included a male community elder or political representative as chaperone) to elicit the gender roles in decision-making in dairy production and incomes

Participants in a focus group discussion of women farmers from Niassante supplying a dairy plant in Richard Toll, Senegal (photo: ILRI/Jo Cadilhon).

Preliminary results from the field
A preliminary analysis of the food security index shows that earning more income from milk, getting a stable milk income throughout the year and keeping larger cow herds all benefit household food security in this region.

In-depth interviews with dairy collectors show that the Laiterie du Berger dairy has helped to fix the dairy nucleus of the herd with settled women and children so as to enable regular delivery of milk to the dairy and animal feed to the cows.

Most significantly, the dairy has adapted its supply chain to the social customs of the Fula herders of this region. Because men here traditionally represent their communities and households, the dairy initially allocated only the male herders with supplier numbers to identify their milk collection buckets. But the dairy also acknowledged that behind the male-dominated facade, women were actually in charge of dairy production and milking. Dairy technicians provide training on better milk production techniques to both men and women and the milk is collected every day from the doors of the women’s houses. The dairy has also conceded multiple supplier numbers and buckets to some men with more than one wife so as to allow different wives of the same household to keep control of their individual milk production and income. In this way, the dairy acknowledges that keeping domestic peace is an important factor of stable milk supplies even though increasing the number of buckets from a collection community increases logistical problems.

Concrete and brick houses replace branch sheds as pastoralist herders settle part of their dairy herd to supply a dairy plant in Richard Toll City, in northern Senegal (photo: ILRI/Jo Cadilhon).

A woman herder we interviewed in Niassanté village on the impact of being more sedentary filled in some of the details for us. Although women and children now stay put with the dairy cows and no longer travel with the men and the rest of the herd as they used to, societal cohesion in the community has actually increased due to the increased dairy incomes, which are enabling the women to buy house building materials and to start consuming goods and services that were formerly out of their reach.

Other stabilizing benefits reported by this woman are that the men now have a fixed and comfortable place to come back to when they return with their nomadic animals from distant pastures and the women no longer have to regularly clear a new campsite and build new temporary shelters for their returning menfolk but can spend their time on more productive household and other activities.

Jo Cadilhon is a senior agricultural economist with ILRI’s Policy, Trade and Value Chains Program.

(Left to right): Heiner Böhme (Namibia Meat Corporation), Edgar Twine (ILRI Tanzania), Signe Nelgen and Jo Cadilhon (both from ILRI Nairobi), presenters on innovative financial products and services for livestock and dairy value chains in Eastern and Southern Africa at CTA’s Fin4Ag conference, 15 July 2014, Nairobi, Kenya (photo credit: ILRI/Jo Cadilhon).

This week (15 Jul 2014), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) organized a discussion at CTA‘s Fin4Ag Conference in Nairobi on ‘Testing innovations in livestock and dairy value chain finance: Insights from East and Southern Africa’.

The discussion was moderated by Jo Cadilhon, a senior agro-economist in ILRI’s Policy, Trade and Value Chains Program who is based at the institute’s Nairobi headquarters. The three speakers on the panel were:

• Signe Nelgen, agro-economist in the Policy, Trade and Value Chains Program of ILRI in Nairobi
  
• Edgar Twine, post-doctoral fellow and value chain economist based in ILRI’s office in Tanzania
• Heiner Böhme, executive in Livestock Procurement at the Meat Corporation of Namibia (Meatco)

The three speakers presented models to provide financial products and services to livestock and dairy value chains; they are available here. Given the specific characteristics of the livestock sector in Africa-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) countries detailed in the video below (also available here), the panel and the discussion with participants came to the following recommendations. The idea is to achieve better collaboration between development stakeholders and the private sector in order to trial new financial products and services relevant to livestock and dairy value chains in ACP countries.

First, a better organization of the value chain actors is a must. This should first be the case between actors involved in the same activity within the value chain (organizations of producers, organizations of traders, etc.). This can lead to bulking produce and thus better bargaining power in transactions. Importantly, grouping also introduces peer pressure and group work leading to better adherence to buyers’ quality requirements and good management practices.

The second recommendation is to allow the emergence of a mechanism for all the stakeholder types involved in the value chains to meet so as to identify their joint challenges and determine how they can all contribute, each according to their capabilities, to implementing strategies to develop livestock-relevant financial products and services. Development partners should facilitate the creation of commodity associations or national-level innovation platforms to allow the private sector, government and non-government agencies, including research organizations, to discuss the challenges of the industry and find out how they can partner to solve them.

Third, value chain stakeholders need to agree mutually on a monitoring, evaluation and internal reporting framework for their value chain financing schemes. This is the mechanism that will ensure that the actors who had agreed to partner in implementing a financial model are indeed playing the role entrusted to them in putting the model into practice.

Fourth, to encourage the participation of private financial stakeholders in the schemes, a mechanism is needed to hedge against the relatively high risks involved in complex multi-stakeholder livestock value chains. A guarantee fund should be set up to allow the finance providers to hedge their risks. If all other recommendations are followed, the loans to smallholder farmers and small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) should not lead to payment default. Thus the initial wariness of financial stakeholders should eventually subside, allowing the guarantee fund to be put to other relevant uses for the value chain. However, dedicated managers are needed to run this guarantee fund.

The final recommendation is to develop the capacities of all stakeholders involved in the value chain so as to make best use of the financial mechanism being set up. Capacities to be developed: better technical and managerial practices for farmers and SMEs; understanding the complexity of local livestock chain contexts for service providers, financial actors and policymakers; identifying credible spaces in which to gather relevant information on the value chain; managing complex and relevant financial products for the bankers and insurers.

Jo Cadilhon, senior agro-economist
ILRI Policies, Trade and Value Chains Program

Image background by Mark Rothko, No 301, 1959 (via Daily Rothko Tumblr Blog).

‘On a hot morning in Nairobi in 2014, Andrew Mude, Team Leader for the Index-Based Livestock Insurance program (IBLI hereafter), looked out of his office window at cows grazing on Ngong Hills’ green pastures, but his mind was elsewhere.

‘In a few hours, he had to attend an executive management meeting where he was expected to recommend IBLI’s next 
steps. But Mude was still undecided: should he recommend that the IBLI team focus exclusively on its current sites in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, and work to develop IBLI into a large-scale, proven and sustainable program in
these regions? Or should he go along with demands to expand quickly to multiple sites worldwide? It was necessary
 for IBLI to grow, but Mude was not yet sure of the direction and trajectory of its growth.

‘IBLI, developed by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in collaboration with Cornell University, and
 the BASIS Research Program at the University of California at Davis, was the first index-based insurance product that 
protected poor pastoralists in drought-stricken areas in Africa from losing their primary asset—livestock. Studies by
 Janzen et al. (2013) had shown that IBLI coverage had a significant impact on these pastoralists’ assets, investments
 and consumption capacity. . . .

‘The goal was clear: to grow IBLI. But when and how should this growth take place? If IBLI stayed in Kenya, how
 could it keep donors happy and build a sustainable program? If they moved to new countries, how could they use
 their insights to be successful elsewhere, while ensuring that the Kenyan and Ethiopian programs were not adversely 
affected? Could they do it all, or would they have to choose? Being either overzealous or overcautious could harm 
IBLI. As ILRI’s senior management team gathered together to plan its 2015–2017 cycle, it was time for Mude to 
present a clearer, better direction for IBLI. . . .’

About this case study
‘Made popular by their extensive use at Harvard Business School, case studies are an effective and popular teaching
 tool employed by business schools worldwide. Management case studies present a real-world management or business 
decision faced by an organization, and are used by instructors to teach students how to think critically through such
 problems.

‘Case studies use a mix of data, interviews and exhibits to give some background and context about a range of 
complex challenges faced by an organization’s stakeholders. While case studies use a real-life situation as a tool for
 discussion, they are not necessarily representative of all the facts, nor do they aim to delineate the right course of 
action. Cases may present alternate trajectories or options, but are generally devoid of any conclusions. They do not
 disclose the eventual decisions made by the case protagonist or the outcomes achieved. Instead, students are asked to
 use the facts and explanations within the case to discuss possible solutions and arrive at their own recommendations
 or decisions. This benefits students by putting them in the place of the real stakeholders and simulating a real-world 
decision making environment. Cases are thus designed to illustrate a complex problem fully, and to facilitate learning 
by encouraging students to develop their own solutions.

‘While case studies are mostly based on realistic scenarios and information, some creative license may be employed for
 teaching purposes. Cases are often accompanied by comprehensive teaching notes, accessible only to the instructors
 of the case, who may also choose to teach the case with the help of supplementary readings and lectures.

Iddo Dror says: ‘This case asks students to focus on growth strategy for a specialized insurance product for the poor. It focuses on the challenges and opportunities of establishing index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) in locations with large populations of poor pastoralists.

‘Students will consider various pressures from the market, governments, donors and partners faced by a nonprofit organization running a socially beneficial program. They will also explore when and how an insurance product serving the poor and vulnerable should be expected to become commercially sustainable and the consideration of donor interests when determining the future direction of non profit projects.’

Iddo Dror prepared this case study with case writer Shreya Maheshwari and IBLI team leader Andrew Mude as the
 basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.
 This case was prepared in collaboration with the IBLI team and benefited from useful insights by a range of partners 
and collaborators of the IBLI program.

Read the whole case study: Using satellite data to insure camels, cows, sheep and goats: IBLI and the development of the world’s first insurance for African pastoralists, by Iddo Dror, Shreya Maheshwari and Andrew Mude.

Horn of Africa from Space (via Planet Earth.ca).

The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an eight-country trade bloc in Africa including governments from the Horn of Africa, the Nile Valley and the African Great Lakes region and with headquarters in Djibouti City, signed a memorandum of understanding last Friday (27 Mar 2015) with the International livestock Research Institute (ILRI). The signing, which took place at an IGAD General Assembly meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, establishes and defines a framework for cooperation and strengthens the IGAD-ILRI research and development work in the IGAD member states: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda.

Under the auspices of a Technical Consortium for Building Resilience in the Horn of Africa, ILRI has been working with IGAD since 2012. ILRI’s primary role in the consortium till now has been to provide technical assistance to the member states in the form of development of investment strategies aimed at ending drought emergencies and ways to measure enhanced resilience.

ILRI and the IGAD Secretariat are already implementing the MOU and developing a joint work plan involving, but not limited to, the following areas of work in support of the IGAD Drought Disaster and Sustainability Initiative (IDDRSI) and the eight member states within the IGAD region.

• The Technical Consortium for Building Resilience in the Horn of Africa
  (the consortium will continue to help measure resilience through data analyses and monitoring and evaluation)
• The Climate Change and Sustainable Intensification mega program in IGAD countries
• Agricultural development master plans along the Lamu Port (Kenya), South Sudan and Ethiopian Transport (LAPSSET) corridors
• Regional and national livestock master plans in IGAD member countries

For more about the Technical Consortium, established in 2011 as a project of the CGIAR and housed at ILRI, see this poster and brochure and check out their website.

Ethiopia’s Minister of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Shiferaw Teklemariam, speaks at UNEA-2 (photo credit: ILRI/Dorine Odongo).

Written by Dorine Odongo, communications and knowledge management specialist for ILRI’s Livestock and Environment Program.

A new  resolution on Combating desertification, land degradation and drought and promoting sustainable pastoralism and rangelands was presented and adopted at the second session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-2) held 23–27 May 2016 at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in Nairobi, Kenya.

At a UNEA-2 side event on sustainable pastoralism, high-level discussions among key players in the livestock sector highlighted pastoralism’s ability to promote healthy ecosystems in the face of climate change, showing that common pastures are potential reservoirs of greenhouse gases.

Kicking off the side event, the deputy executive director of UNEP and assistant secretary-general of the United Nations, Ibrahim Thiaw, reminded participants that ten years ago, myths and misconceptions surrounding pastoralism were already being strongly debunked—particularly those portraying it as ‘primitive, unproductive and environmentally destructive’.

Research showing that pastoralism promotes healthy productive ecosystems continues to be largely ignored, underexploited or misunderstood.

The side event was spearheaded by UNEP, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and other collaborators.

UNEA’s then president and minister for environment and green development in Mongolia, Oyuna Sanjasuren, argued that pastoralism plays a key role in protecting ecosystems but must be managed well to be sustainable.

Ethiopia’s minister for environment, forests and climate change, Shiferaw Teklemariam, said that to achieve the United Nations 2030 and Africa 2063 agendas, pastoralist issues must be addressed and with a unified voice. Such issues include policies to protect pastoralists, increased investment in drylands, improved pastoralist access to markets and incentives for pastoral environmental stewardship.

Ethiopian Minister of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Shiferaw Teklemariam, left, with Iain Wright, ILRI Deputy Director General, at UNEA-2 (photo credit: ILRI/Dorine Odongo).

Land tenure for pastoralists: how best to achieve?
Lack of land rights is a huge challenge for pastoralists, posing big threats to pastoral sustainability and viability. This is recognized in the UN’s recently adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs #1, 2 and 5).

ILRI conducts research on pastoral and agro-pastoral dryland environments, investigating such issues as institutional and governance approaches to promoting participatory land-use planning and land tenure systems. In addition, ILRI works to promote sustainable use of rangelands and to improve livestock-based livelihoods. Together with its Kenyan NGO partner RECONCILE (Resource Conflict Institute), ILRI coordinates and supports the Global Rangelands Initiative of the International Land Coalition (ILC). The initiative, established in 2010, supports governments and members of the ILC in Africa, Asia and Latin America to develop and implement enabling policies and legislation for more tenure-secure rangelands.

Abdelkader Bensada, an officer responsible for UNEP’s work on sustainable pastoralism and rangeland conservation and UNEP’s focal point for the International Land Coalition, talks with Fiona Flintan, a rangelands governance scientist on joint appointment with ILRI and the International Land Coalition, at the rangelands side event at UNEA-2 (Global Rangelands Initiative) (photo credit: ILRI/Dorine Odongo).

Pushing the sustainable pastoralism agenda higher
A coalition of international organizations working on livestock and environment issues, in addition to several African governments, led by Ethiopia, Namibia and Sudan, fronted the resolution for adoption by UNEA 2, and in so doing managed to push sustainable pastoralism and rangelands higher up the international development agenda. The passing of this resolution was the latest example of the importance people are placing on SDG 15, ‘Sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, halt biodiversity loss’, and of the need for multilateral environmental agencies to cooperate and collaborate.

This move has provided much-needed impetus for investing in pastoralism in order to optimize and realize its full potential and comparative advantage as a livelihood system, particularly suitable for coping with climatic variability and change.

See photos from the side event here.

For further information, see ILRI’s Livestock Systems and Environment blog or contact Dorine Odongo (d.odongo [at] cgiar.org) or Fiona Flintan (f.flintan [at] cgiar.org).

Andrew Mude, a principal research scientist
at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in Nairobi, Kenya,
was yesterday named the 5th recipient of a prestigious award
for his work in providing insurance to livestock herders
in East Africa’s drylands through innovative, state-of-the-art technologies.

It was announced yesterday (30 Aug 2016) in Nairobi, Kenya, that Andrew Mude has won the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application. Mude’s is developing insurance for never-before-insured communities whose livelihoods depend on herding cattle, goats, sheep and camels in the remote, arid and drought-prone lowlands of the Horn of Africa. He and his colleagues have made novel use of satellite data to achieve an innovative and highly effective solution that helps pastoral livestock herders reduce the considerable and costly drought-risk they face in this region.

At an event hosted by Director General Jimmy Smith of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi, Kenya, Mude’s selection as the winner of the 2016 Borlaug Field Award for individuals under the age of 40 was made by Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, president of the World Food Prize Foundation, which is headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa. The field award is endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

¶

Dr Mude reflects Borlaug-like persistence in his science-based, community-mediated and innovative approach to providing financial protection, through insurance, to millions of poor herders and their families who care for and depend upon their livestock as they move across the vast rangelands of East Africa.

It should be a matter of great pride for Kenya that two of the first five Borlaug Field Award recipients are Kenyans.

—Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, President of the World Food Prize Foundation

¶

Charity Mutegi, a food scientist and also of Kenya, received the award in 2013. Mutegi coordinates an Aflasafe project in Kenya protecting consumers from aflatoxin contamination of foodstuffs; Aflasafe is led by the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA).

ILRI’s Andrew Mude will be formally presented with USD10,000 and the ‘Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, Endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation’, in a special ceremony on 12 Oct 2016, in which Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin will participate, in Des Moines, Iowa, USA, as part of the 2016 World Food Prize international symposium.

A Kenyan native who received his PhD from Cornell University, 39-year-old Mude is a principal economist at ILRI, a CGIAR research centre. He spearheads a program called ‘Index-Based Livestock Insurance’ (IBLI), which is greatly reducing the vulnerability of East Africa’s livestock herding families to recurring droughts, which kill great numbers of livestock, sending many hungry households in remote regions into deep and lasting poverty.

Since launching IBLI in 2008, Mude and his team have engaged local herders and leaders in building and delivering extension education programs—employing, in addition to traditional communications and training materials, videos, cartoons, radio broadcasts as well as e-learning platforms and ‘gamifications’ for insurance sales agents—to increase understanding of the principles, coverage and marketing of the insurance plans.

Before Mude’s innovative approach was implemented, African herders had no access to livestock insurance. It was highly impractical and costly for insurance claim adjusters to travel through East Africa to confirm dead animals and pay claims. IBLI eliminates the need for such visual confirmation of stock losses by using satellite data to monitor grazing conditions. When these conditions are seen to fall below a certain threshold, these data serve as a proxy for dead animals and insurance payouts are made.

By early 2016, 11,800 IBLI contracts had been sold (representing an insured livestock value of USD5,350,000) and USD149,007 indemnity payments made to insured pastoralists. In future, more than 50 million pastoralists across Africa are expected to have an opportunity to benefit from this financial technology.

¶

Dr Mude represents the type of citizen-servant we as a government are proud to partner with. He is a citizen dedicated to helping grow the productivity and welfare of the Kenyan people.

It’s because of Andrew Mude’s passion, commitment and technical competence that we’re now planning to replicate this novel insurance scheme across all of northern Kenya, where some 4 million pastoralists depend primarily on livestock.

—Willy Bett, Cabinet Secretary in the Kenya Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries

¶ 

Dr Mude’s Index-Based Livestock Insurance program is a remarkable example of the innovative, market-driven solutions that develop when countries invest in quality education for young people.

—Robert Godec, United States Ambassador to Kenya

¶

With today’s changing climate, weather-based insurance has become a critical tool in building the resilience of some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. By utilizing the most current technology, Dr Mude’s innovation is helping pastoralist livestock herders to protect their livelihoods.

We can provide farmers with no better form of food security than by empowering them to protect themselves from the impacts of climate change.

—Mamadou Biteye, Managing Director of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Africa Regional Office

¶

We have the satellite technology needed to monitor grazing conditions in the remotest of regions. We should be using it to ensure that Africa’s remote livestock herders have access to basic insurance farmers around the world take for granted.

We draw inspiration from Norman Borlaug’s lifelong commitment to make his agricultural research make a difference.

Together with many partners and the herders themselves—and only together—we’re determined to find new ways to help millions of people continue to practice the oldest form of sustainable food production the world has ever seen.

—Andrew Mude, ILRI economist and award winner

¶

A new Kenya Government ‘Kenya Livestock Insurance Program’ (KLIP), based on IBLI, has already provided 5,012 households with livestock insurance coverage. Just last week (24 Aug 2016), the Kenya Government’s KLIP made indemnity payments to 290 herders in Kenya’s huge and arid northern county of Wajir, which has suffered prolonged drought.

And in Ethiopia, Kenya’s neighbour to the north, a government pilot project spearheaded by Mude’s team is working to scale out this insurance program while the World Food Program is making IBLI-type insurance a key pillar of its food security strategy in Ethiopia’s pastoralist lowlands. Other governments and development agencies are seeking help in testing IBLI-type policies across West Africa’s Sahel and the drylands of southern Africa.

¶

‘Take it to the farmer’ are reported to be the last words uttered by Norman Borlaug before he died.

Andrew Mude and his team, working with the Kenya and Ethiopian governments, insurance agencies and others, have taken Borlaug’s injunction to heart, and are taking it even further—to thousands of individual pastoralists raising and herding their animal stock across the vast, remote and generally inhospitable drylands of the Horn of Africa.

—Jimmy Smith, Director General of ILRI

¶

About the Norman Borlaug award for Field Research and Application
An independent jury of experts chaired by Dr Ronnie Coffman selected Dr Mude from an impressive group of candidates who were evaluated based on the attributes and accomplishments that reflect those demonstrated by Dr Norman Borlaug during his work at the Rockefeller Foundation and as a scientist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in developing high-yielding, disease-resistant wheat in Mexico and introducing adaptable wheat varieties into India and Pakistan during the 1950s and 60s, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. More details at www.worldfoodprize.org/borlaugfieldaward/

¶

About the World Food Prize
The World Food Prize was created in 1986 by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr Norman Borlaug. It is the foremost international award recognizing individuals whose achievements have advanced human development by increasing the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world. The prize was endowed by the Ruan family of Des Moines, Iowa. Businessman John Ruan III now serves as chairman of the foundation and Ambassador Kenneth M Quinn, former US ambassador to Cambodia, is the president of the organization. A selection committee of experts from around the world oversees the nomination and selection process and is chaired by Prof MS Swaminathan, of India, who was also honoured as the first World Food Prize Laureate. Other past prize winners include former President of Ghana John Kufour, US senators Bob Dole and George McGovern, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr Muhammad Yunus, Professor Yuan Longping of China and former Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme Catherine Bertini.

¶

Media contact
Michelle Geis | Director of Africa Burness, ILRI | mgeis@burness.com | +254 711 326 770

¶

More information
More information will be posted here soon. To view a film of the whole event, go to http://www.ilri.org/livestream

Photographs of the event are on ILRI’s Flickr album here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ilri/albums/72157669992212163

View the original press release, by Nicole Barreca, from the World Food Prize Foundation, here: http://www.worldfoodprize.org/index.cfm/24667/39777/the_world_food_prize_recognizes_kenyan_economist

Cattle and Maasai herders and zebra share grazing land in Kenya (Photo credit: Rob Pringle/Harvard University).

Here’s a wake up call for all those who care about Kenya’s rich heritage of wild animals, rangelands and pastoral peoples. A new study reporting on the period from 1977 to 2016 says wildlife on the rangelands of Kenya, which still support some of the richest herds of mammals on earth, is in precipitous decline while populations of goats and sheep are increasingly sharply.

These results are published in a new paper, Extreme wildlife declines and concurrent increase in livestock numbers in Kenya: What are the causes?, written by Joe Ogutu, a Kenyan scientist formerly working at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and now at the University of Hohenheim, and Hans-Peter Piepho (University of Hohenheim), Mohamed Said (ILRI), Gordon Ojwang (Directorate of Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing [DRSRS]), Lucy Njino (DRSRS), Shem Kifugo (ILRI) and Patrick Wargute (DRSRS).

One of the solutions advanced is strengthening community-based wildlife conservancies:

With the right incentives and support wildlife conservancies can and have been an avenue for addressing wildlife loss.
—Dickson Ole Kaelo, CEO, Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association

From the results section of the paper

The most salient features of the trends
were a striking increase in numbers of sheep and goats and camels
and concurrent
extreme declines in numbers of 14 of the 18 common wildlife species
throughout Kenya’s rangelands between 1977 and 2016.

‘The numbers of sheep and goats aggregated across all the 21 rangeland counties (“national” trend) increased markedly by 76.3%, followed by 13.1% for camels (Camelus dromedarius) and 6.7% for donkeys (Equus asinus) while the number of cattle (Bos indicus) dropped by 25.2%. In sharp contrast to the increasing trends or moderate declines in livestock numbers, the aggregated numbers of the common wildlife species declined precipitously, and for certain species catastrophically, in the same period in the Kenyan rangelands.’

From the abstract to the paper

‘There is growing evidence of escalating wildlife losses worldwide. Extreme wildlife losses have recently been documented for large parts of Africa, including western, Central and Eastern Africa. Here, we report extreme declines in wildlife and contemporaneous increase in livestock numbers in Kenya rangelands between 1977 and 2016. Our analysis uses systematic aerial monitoring survey data collected in rangelands that collectively cover 88% of Kenya’s land surface. Our results show that wildlife numbers declined on average by 68% between 1977 and 2016. The magnitude of decline varied among species but was most extreme (72–88%) and now severely threatens the population viability and persistence of warthog, lesser kudu, Thomson’s gazelle, eland, oryx, topi, hartebeest, impala, Grevy’s zebra and waterbuck in Kenya’s rangelands.

‘The declines were widespread and occurred in most of the 21 rangeland counties. Likewise to wildlife, cattle numbers decreased (25.2%) but numbers of sheep and goats (76.3%), camels (13.1%) and donkeys (6.7%) evidently increased in the same period. As a result, livestock biomass was 8.1 times greater than that of wildlife in 2011–2013 compared to 3.5 times in 1977–1980. Most of Kenya’s wildlife (ca. 30%) occurred in Narok County alone. The proportion of the total “national” wildlife population found in each county increased between 1977 and 2016 substantially only in Taita Taveta and Laikipia but marginally in Garissa and Wajir counties, largely reflecting greater wildlife losses elsewhere.

‘The declines raise very grave concerns about the future of wildlife, the effectiveness of wildlife conservation policies, strategies and practices in Kenya. Causes of the wildlife declines include exponential human population growth, increasing livestock numbers, declining rainfall and a striking rise in temperatures but the fundamental cause seems to be policy, institutional and market failures. Accordingly, we thoroughly evaluate wildlife conservation policy in Kenya. We suggest policy, institutional and management interventions likely to succeed in reducing the declines and restoring rangeland health, most notably through strengthening and investing in community and private wildlife conservancies in the rangelands.’

From the introduction to the paper

‘Rapid human population growth is driving wildlife population declines in Africa through its influence on expansion of agriculture, settlements and development of infrastructure. Deterioration in wildlife and livestock habitats caused by major land use and cover changes is exacerbated by climate change and variability, piling enormous pressures on pastoralism, ranching and wildlife conservation in African rangelands and protected areas. . . .

‘Rangelands cover about 512586.8 km², representing 88% of the 582,646 km² land surface of Kenya. They are hot, semiarid or arid with highly variable rainfall, often averaging less than 600 mm per year and thus are drought-prone and less suitable for sustainable crop production. The rangelands are currently home to 32.6% of the Kenyan population (12,582,028 of 38,610,097 people in 2009), principally pastoral communities and are crucially important for extensive livestock production and wildlife conservation in Kenya. More than half of the Kenyan livestock populations are found on these rangelands’

From the main section of the paper

What should be done to stop the wildlife declines?

‘Since policy, institutional and market failures are at the heart of wildlife declines in Kenya, we examine important gaps in the current wildlife conservation and management policy which need to be addressed to stem the wildlife losses.

To be successful, efforts aiming to slow down or halt the declines and restore the depleted wildlife populations and the degraded rangelands must address the twin crux issues: what is wildlife beneficial for and who mainly benefits?

‘Such efforts must also account for the possibility that large areas of East Africa will inevitably pass over to more lucrative activities, as has happened, for example, in South Africa, which no longer has any counterpart of subsistence pastoralism. Counteracting this progression will require that some pastoral lands retaining wildlife should be buffered against such changes to ensure that they deliver the multiple benefits that they provide sustainably.

This demands a far-sighted land-use plan to secure wildlife habitats from the impacts of the rapidly expanding human and livestock populations.

‘Such a plan would benefit from incorporating the biosphere concept of a protected core area enlarged by a multi-use buffer zone with compatible activities.

‘As the future role of wildlife has become a leading issue globally it is not surprising that different countries are following different routes in search for solutions, including (1) laissez-faire as traditionally prevalent in Kenya, (2) multiple economic uses including hunting, as in Tanzania and earlier in Botswana, (3) devolvement of full financial control to local communities, as in Namibia, (4) fenced protected areas as tourist attractions or living museums, as in South Africa, (5) private ownership in fenced ranches or conservancies, as in South Africa, and (6) transfrontier protected areas, consisting of a mosaic of wildlands and settlements. Despite the diversity of these approaches, the basic issues confronting all countries with wildlife are primarily those of land ownership and devolvement of financial benefits.

A crucial need is thus for part of the benefits of protected areas and conservancies to filter down to impoverished neighbours.

‘Although East Africa still supports the richest herds of wildlife on earth, our analysis shows that the future of Kenyan wildlife is in serious jeopardy without urgent, far-reaching and far-sighted changes to their current conservation and management. The new Act therefore not only restores some badly needed hope but also recognizes that for much of Kenya, environmental imperatives have progressed far beyond “conservation” to “recovery” and “restoration”. . . .

‘One of the hallmarks of the new Wildlife Conservation and Management Act 2013 is that it promotes private and community conservation and transition from open-access to private property regimes. It thus provides a framework within which communities can be empowered to use, manage and receive expanded economic benefits from wildlife. Greater benefits enhance the importance of wildlife as a component of livelihoods and development, help pay the costs of conservation and reduce human-wildlife conflicts. Yet, widespread poverty and inequality still deny many landowners the opportunity to benefit from wildlife. This reduces interest and investment in conservation because, understandably, attitudes of people towards conservation on private or communal lands are often shaped by the amount and distribution of financial benefits from supporting wildlife on their lands. Communities getting no benefits from wildlife and having little say in national policy, as most pastoralists are, are more likely to be more intolerant to wildlife.

‘Although initially started by individuals and communities in a policy vacuum, wildlife conservancies have had some tangible success in Kenya, associated with direct economic benefits to poor landowner households, poverty alleviation, rising land values and increasing wildlife numbers within the conservancies.

As a result, conservancies are fast emerging as the centrepiece of natural resource conservation on the rangelands and broader development institutions for championing community development projects around the conservancies and ensuring sustainability through land use planning, managing wildlife, livestock, rangelands, and forests, trading in conservation beef, organic products or carbon—because traditional institutions have collapsed in the pastoral lands.

‘Community conservation in conservancies is also important in complementing limited capacity and skills of state agencies and dwindling state resources for conservation in the wake of mounting conservation challenges.

Important wildlife policy gaps that should be addressed to stop the declines

‘Here, we highlight some root causes of wildlife declines that are not adequately addressed by the current wildlife conservation policy and hence need to be urgently addressed. It is crucial to regulate livestock stocking levels to limit the number of livestock that can be reared on the available rangelands in conservancies, or ranches to minimize rangeland degradation through overgrazing. Reducing livestock stocking levels is also important to ensuring economic viability and sustainability of wildlife conservation on the human and livestock dominated pastoral lands. High livestock stocking levels are associated with declines in large mammalian species richness, abundance and distribution. Regulating livestock stocking levels will also help ensure that pastoralists do not regularly move increasingly large livestock herds to conservancies, parks and reserves, as currently happens.

As most ordinary pastoralists still earn more from livestock than wildlife, it is crucial to maintain some balance between conservancies and livestock, make and enforce rules that control livestock grazing in conservancies. These measures will ensure that communities benefit from wildlife without necessarily having to sacrifice all their current major livelihood—livestock.

‘However, policies that can guide the development of models for optimally integrating livestock and wildlife in conservancies to ensure economically viable conservancies on pastoral lands rather than completely separating pastoral livestock and wildlife, especially in areas with low tourism potential, are still lacking. Although there are some benefits to be gained by not completely separating wildlife from livestock in conservancies, including mutually beneficial long-term modifications of rangeland habitats, livestock grazing and herd size in conservancies should be regulated and monitored. This is especially important because a major problem for conservancies currently is that some pastoral land owners benefitting from conservancies use their incomes to buy more livestock that then compete with wildlife and degrade rangeland habitats. Equally important to regulate and monitor to stem widespread destruction of woodland habitats is clear felling of woodlands for charcoal trade, fuel wood, fencing, and construction materials in pastoral lands.

‘. . . There is . . .  need to build community capacity in wildlife conservation, management and protection, conservation planning, effective leadership, security operations, conservation business enterprises, technical and negotiation skills, access to information, democratic and effective collective or collaborative action. . . . [T]he participation and support of pastoral land owners is critical to the success of conservancies because they have to vacate their lands for conservancies, refrain from erecting fences and other developments. Wildlife conservation policy should also recognize that wildlife is not just a Kenyan heritage but a global heritage, conferring upon Kenya both global and local responsibilities that need funding for conservation and habitat restoration. . . .

Wildlife policy should embrace a strong paradigm shift away from the past and current bureaucratic uncertainty, crippling restrictions on use, and extracting most wildlife revenues from community areas.

Wildlife policy should also do away with state nationalization, monopolization and centralization of wildlife and grant local communities responsibility and authority over local conservation decisions within a wider and carefully crafted framework of accountability, regulation and governance.

Read the paper, published on PLOS ONE, Extreme wildlife declines and concurrent increase in livestock numbers in Kenya: What are the causes?, by Joseph Ogutu (University of Hohenheim, formerly of ILRI), Hans-Peter Piepho (University of Hohenheim), Mohamed Said (ILRI), Gordon Ojwang (Directorate of Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing [DRSRS]), Lucy Njino (DRSRS), Shem Kifugo (ILRI) and Patrick Wargute (DRSRS), 27 Sep 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0163249

The following excerpts of a related and earlier policy paper provide more context: ‘More than half of the wildlife habitat in Kenya is located outside protected areas, dispersed in private and community grazing lands. The traditional pastoral approach to livestock husbandry is considered compatible with and complementary to wildlife. However, these areas have undergone increasing land use pressure within the past decades, leading to land degradation largely due to climatic factors, notably recurrent droughts and low and declining amounts of rainfall, increasing human and livestock population and unsustainable land uses. Pastoralists range has become too restricted for traditional livestock grazing practices forcing them to diversify livestock-based economies and agriculture. As the pressure on land intensifies, there is potential for conflict between wildlife and people over grazing land, characterised by competition for key resources, predation on domestic livestock, and disease transmission. Wildlife populations and their habitats have been adversely affected by these changes. Restoration of degraded arid environments is critically needed as a mitigation measure against land degradation, biodiversity loss, climate change (Lal, 2009) and for enhancing the adaptive capacity of the local agro-pastoral communities. . . .

‘One of the key ecological constraints in the coexistence of livestock and wildlife at the livestock-wildlife interface environments is pasture scarcity. Since the pastoral economy is pinned on livestock keeping, land degradation has led to depletion of livelihoods base, leading to poverty, food insecurity and resource conflicts which pose a serious conservation challenge. Implementation of NRM plans including land use zoning within the community wildlife conservancies is a step towards finding the right solution. . . .’ (Taken from: Range Rehabilitation for Wildlife Conservation and Pastoral Livestock Production, Policy Brief 1, Feb 2013, USAID and Higher Education for Development).

And further, and on a more hopeful note, you can watch American Robin Reid, an ecologist formerly with ILRI and a colleague of the paper’s authors Joe Ogutu, Mohamed Said, Shem Kifugo and also Dickson Ole Kaelo, and, since 2008, founding director of the Center for Collaborative Conservation at Colorado State University, describe how collaboration can change pastoral lands and lives:

Robin Reid gave the eighth ‘President’s Community Lecture’ hosted by Colorado State University in Fort Collins on 27 Sep 2016:

 Andrew Mude, speaking at an event announcing his award held at ILRI
in Nairobi, Kenya, 30 Aug 2016 (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

Researcher Andrew Mude and colleagues are also receiving
today a USAID ‘Award for Scientific Excellence’.

Both awards honour innovative use of
satellite technology and community outreach
to develop livestock insurance for
vulnerable herding communities in the Horn of Africa.

Andrew Mude, an economist and principal scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), is being presented with the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application today, 12 Oct 2016, for his work leading an innovative livestock insurance program that employs satellite data to help protect livestock herding communities in the Horn of Africa from the devastating effects of drought.

The accolade, named to honour the legendary crop scientist and Nobel Prize winner, will be presented to Mude by Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin at a special ceremony that includes hundreds of agriculture experts from around the world attending the 2016 World Food Prize Borlaug Symposium in Iowa. The Rockefeller Foundation provides the endowment for the Borlaug field Award, which includes USD10,000 for the winner.

‘Borlaug’s footprint and legacy are immense and it’s humbling to be honoured in association with him’, Mude says. ‘When the World Food Prize committee selected me, I think they were celebrating a scientist who aims to emulate Borlaug’s relentless commitment to following through on his research to ensure it makes an impact in communities still struggling to achieve food security.’

At a separate World Food Prize/Borlaug Symposium event today in Des Moines, Mude and his colleagues from the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) and Cornell University will receive an Award for Scientific Excellence from the Board for International Food and Agriculture Development (BIFAD), which is part of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The BIFAD award recognizes significant achievements originating from work performed through a USAID Feed the Future Innovation Lab, which has provided support for the livestock insurance project since its inception via the BASIS Assets and Market Access Innovation Lab team, now based at UC Davis.

‘More than a decade of research into the conditions that contribute to poverty among pastoralist communities produced a strong set of solutions that Andrew and the rest of the BASIS team skillfully implemented in the field’, said Michael Carter, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the UC Davis. ‘It’s exactly the kind of work Borlaug envisioned when he urged agriculture researchers to take their solutions directly to farmers and food producers, particularly in places whether they face a daily struggle to survive.’

Mixing technology and innovation with grassroots outreach
A Kenyan native who received his PhD from Cornell University, 39-year-old Mude leads a project called Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI), which is greatly reducing the vulnerability of East Africa’s livestock herding families to recurring droughts.

‘With today’s changing climate, and the increasing frequency of droughts, weather-based insurance has become a critical tool in building the resilience of some of the world’s most vulnerable populations’, said Mamadou Biteye, managing director of The Rockefeller Foundation Africa Regional Office. ‘By utilizing the most current technology, Dr Mude’s innovation is helping livestock herders protect their livelihoods. We can provide herders with no better form of food security than by empowering them to protect themselves from the impacts of climate change.’

A key feature of the program is its use of satellite data gathered every ten days by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and then processed by NASA to create a ‘vegetation index’ that allows Mude and his colleagues to track the density of vegetation available to pastoralists in the Horn of Africa. Payouts are made to policy holders when the index shows that forage availability has declined below an agreed threshold. That’s a signal that rains have failed and drought—responsible for 75 per cent of livestock deaths in the region—is at hand.

Before the innovative IBLI approach was implemented, African herders had no access to livestock insurance to protect their most valuable assets, whose losses can lead to a lifetime of poverty. Yet it was highly impractical and costly for insurance claim adjusters to travel through the vast rangelands of East Africa to confirm dead animals and pay claims. The satellite data provides a solution to that problem: Its measurement of forage serve as a proxy for conditions on the ground that could imperil livestock.

‘This is a much-deserved recognition that does more than just honour Andrew; it also makes a powerful statement about the importance of livestock to the food security of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people’, said ILRI Director General Jimmy Smith. ‘For a billion people in the world today, livestock are their most valuable asset—an irreplaceable source of food, income and labor—and protecting them, as Andrew and his colleagues are doing, should be a high priority.’

Since launching IBLI in 2008, Mude and his team have engaged local herders and leaders in building and delivering education programs—employing videos, innovative games, cartoons, radio broadcasts and most recently mobile learning applications—to increase understanding of the principles and coverage of the insurance product. These learning tools help teach basic concepts of livestock insurance, like the fact that premiums must be paid even if grazing conditions stay healthy and no payout occurs.

‘Our engagement with the community has resulted in a number of important insights leading to continued improvement of the IBLI product and the efficiency of service-delivery. For example, where payouts were previously made to replace dead livestock, they are now made when rains fail and drought appears imminent, giving herders the means to purchase feed, medicine or other inputs that will help their animals survive the drought. This is proving more effective at providing a safety net for herding households than making payouts to help replace dead animals’, explained Mude.

From a pilot project to a country-wide initiative
Since 2010, when IBLI began offering insurance contracts in one county in Kenya, it has expanded across northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia; 11,750 herders in northern Kenya (Marsabit, Isiolo, Wajir, Garissa and Mandera counties) and 3,905 herders in southern Ethiopia have purchased IBLI insurance contracts. Since 2011, more than USD200,000 in payouts—USD159,000 in Kenya and USD50,000 in Ethiopia—have been triggered by poor herding conditions.

The results from the project are encouraging. For example, evidence from the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa found that households insured with IBLI were less likely to sell off livestock or reduce meals as coping strategies. Overall, insured households are more likely to invest in veterinary services and to have greater milk productivity. And children in the insured households are more likely to be better nourished.

Governments have taken notice and are now adopting the model and partnering with the IBLI team. The Kenyan Government is now providing IBLI coverage to 9,000 households through the Kenya Livestock Insurance Program (KLIP) and expects to cover 80,000 to 100,000 households by 2019. Most recently, in late August 2016, KLIP made indemnity payments to a few hundred herders in Kenya’s huge and arid northern county of Wajir, which has suffered prolonged drought.

And in Ethiopia, a government pilot project spearheaded by Mude’s team is working to expand its insurance program, while the World Food Programme (WFP) is making IBLI-type insurance a key pillar of its food security strategy in Ethiopia’s pastoralist lowlands. Other governments and development agencies are seeking help in testing IBLI-type policies across West Africa’s Sahel and in the drylands of southern Africa.

We have the satellite technology needed
to monitor grazing conditions in the remotest of regions.

We should be using it to ensure that Africa’s
remote livestock herders have access to the basic insurance
farmers around the world take for granted.

We draw inspiration from Borlaug’s lifelong commitment
to ensure his research makes a difference.

Together with many partners and the herders themselves—
and only together—we’re determined to find new ways
to help millions of people continue to practice
the oldest form of sustainable food production
the world has ever seen.

—Andrew Mude

Notes
The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) works with partners worldwide to improve food and nutrition security and to reduce poverty in developing countries through research on efficient, safe and sustainable use of livestock—ensuring better lives through livestock. The products generated by ILRI and its partners help people in developing countries enhance their livestock-dependent livelihoods, health and environments. ILRI is a CGIAR research centre working for a food-secure future. ILRI is co-hosted by the governments of Kenya and Ethiopia, and has offices in 16 countries across southern and West Africa and South, Southeast and East Asia. www.ilri.org

Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) is a project developed in partnership by ILRI, Cornell University and the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Assets and Market Access hosted by the University of California at Davis, and involving a whole range of other important stakeholders. The IBLI project has been funded by the World Bank Group, the UK’s DfID, USAID, the European Union and the Australian DFAT. Further information on the wider program agenda is available at https://ibli.ilri.org/

About the Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application
An independent jury of experts chaired by Ronnie Coffman selected Mude from an impressive group of candidates who were evaluated based on the attributes and accomplishments that reflect those demonstrated by Norman Borlaug during his work at The Rockefeller Foundation in developing high-yielding, disease-resistant wheat in Mexico and introducing adaptable wheat varieties into India and Pakistan during the 1950s and 1960s, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. More details at www.worldfoodprize.org/borlaugfieldaward/.

The World Food Prize was created in 1986 by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Norman Borlaug. It is the foremost international award recognizing individuals whose achievements have advanced human development by increasing the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world. The prize was endowed by the Ruan family of Des Moines, Iowa. Businessman John Ruan III now serves as chairman of the foundation and Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, former US Ambassador to Cambodia, is president of the organization. A selection committee of experts from around the world oversees the nomination and selection process, and is chaired by MS Swaminathan, of India, who was the first World Food Prize Laureate. Other past prize winners include former president of Ghana, John Kufour; US senators Bob Dole and George McGovern; Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus; Yuan Longping, of China, and former executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, Catherine Bertini.

BETTER SCIENCE, BETTER LIVES
The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI),
headquartered in Africa and working in poor countries
worldwide to provide better lives through livestock,
held its Institute Planning Meeting from 4 to 7 Oct 2016.
This is the sixth of a series of blog articles reporting on
plans for ILRI research programs, including ILRI’s
work in west and southern Africa and south, east and southeast Asia.

A central question for ILRI’s Sustainable Livestock Systems program is:
‘What does “sustainable intensification” mean in different contexts?’
—ILRI’s Ben Hack reporting on #ipm2016

ILRI Sustainable
Livestock Systems Program

Polly Ericksen introduced the Sustainable Livestock Systems program by saying that the group of 28 ILRI scientists and some 40 research and other support staff provide data on the environmental footprint of livestock production (e.g. African greenhouse gas emissions data), help partners to design incentives to take up strategies for better environmental management of livestock production, inform international climate finance initiatives and build capacity.

Vision

ILRI’s new Sustainable Livestock Systems program works for a future in which livestock are productive in the face of uncertain trajectories, help poor people to manage risks and shocks and provide environmental benefits.

Objectives

This program works to characterize and understand the environmental risks and benefits, as well as the broader constraints to increasing livestock productivity, that livestock keepers need to address. The program uses this knowledge to develop strategies to overcome these constraints and to catalyze an enabling environment that ensures the dissemination of these strategies through partners, leading to their uptake by ILRI’s target beneficiaries.

Themes

Under the first theme above, the program will conduct research both to mitigate livestock greenhouse gas emissions and other negative environmental impacts and to help livestock keepers adapt to climate change.

Under the second theme listed above, the program will work with partners to get a clearer understanding of what sustainable intensification means in different contexts and to determine what conducive market, policy and other environments are needed to support sustainable livestock intensification. Program staff will also actively help develop capacity within institutions to do and promote sustainable development and support uptake of interventions by stakeholder groups.

Under the third them listed above, promoting resilient livestock systems, the program will support groups on many levels, including: (1) national and local governments to adopt and conduct evidenced-based policies and programs, (2) private-sector actors to invest in options that help build resilient livestock systems, (3) donor and development agencies to pursue investments and programs that help build resilient livestock systems, and (4) households to adopt livestock-based practices and technologies that work to build resilience.

The program staff have taken a first crack at mapping an impact pathway, which looks like the figure below. What’s most clear to the staff at the moment are the three high-level impacts they’re aiming for: (1) productive livestock in the face of future change, (2) poor people profiting in the face of risks and shocks and (3) enhanced environmental benefits from livestock.

We want to turn the messaging around:
Livestock as a generator of environmental goods.
To conduct this kind of advocacy work,
we have a bit of seed money from the Gates Foundation.
—ILRI’s Ben Hack reporting on #ipm2016

Exciting science!

ILRI’s Lance Robinson, a specialist in community-based
environmental governance, said that the kinds of interventions
appropriate for drylands are largely social and institutional
rather than plot-level, technological or physical.

Those in my field are ready now to ask,
‘What works best in which contexts?’

With our growing body of case studies,
we can now start testing hypotheses.

Taken downstream, our research can provide
specific guidance to governments, NGOs and donor agencies,
about how they can best support community approaches
to rangeland management, which we think suit
intensification in rangeland settings.

For more information, contact ILRI’s Sustainable Livestock Systems program leader Polly Ericksen, p.ericksen [at] cgiar.org.

Andrew Mude, a Kenyan economist at ILRI who leads a multi-centre Index-Based Livestock Insurance project (IBLI) in the Horn of Africa, is this year’s Norman Borlaug Field Award winner (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

This has been a good—and relatively big—season for work to support the world’s arid lands and peoples. Drylands tend to be overlooked in agricultural discussions. (That world leaders and climate negotiators are convening this week and next at the COP22 UN climate change summit in Marrakech, an economic and tourist oasis rising amid lemon, orange and olive groves some 15–20 miles away from North Africa’s Atlas Mountains and a day’s drive from the Sahara Desert proper, also can’t be bad for dryland peoples, researchers and ambassadors.)

While making up some 40 per cent of the world’s total land area (excluding the hyperarid ‘true deserts’) and including areas in some of the world’s poorest countries (Africa’s drylands cover 43 per cent of the continent), drylands aren’t talked about much when concerns are raised about the world’s warming climate and the toll this could take on our ability to feed the world’s growing population. With drylands providing much of the world’s grain as well as livestock while suffering increasingly from highly variable rainfall amounts and intensities as well as recurrent and prolonged droughts, this omission is more than ‘passing strange’. For details of when and where livestock issues related to climate change took (near) centre stage this fall, please scroll down to the next section.

To cap off this season’s most public of public communications on dryland issues, this week New York Times editorial writer Tina Rosenberg took a good long look at ILRI’s Index-Based Livestock Insurance scheme being piloted in the Horn of Africa and published her thoughts in an opinion piece, Up in the sky, help to keep Africans from starving (8 Nov 2016).

While grateful that Rosenberg has helped raise awareness of an important neglected topic—food production in water-constrained ecosystems—ILRI and its partners in this pastoral insurance scheme, known by its acronym, ‘IBLI’, are most gratified that this journalist chose to highlight a solution rather than a problem. This is a welcome counter to much Western media coverage of pastoral life in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere, which tends to focus on the fate of the wildlife sharing these lands at the expense of the people, or to recycle worn narratives lamenting either the ‘backwardness’ of herding cultures or the passing of ‘pastoral ways of life’.

The fact is that pastoralism is a robust and enduring food production system. It is very much alive and well in the 21st century. It is able to play major roles in feeding and nourishing a warming world—in providing livelihoods in remote regions and critical ecosystem services—all while making productive and sustainable use of what are typically termed ‘marginal lands’. It is thus a welcome change to see media coverage that focuses on practical solutions for helping dryland peoples to grow ever more resilient and innovative in the face of recurring droughts and other big global changes.

Here are some excerpts from Rosenberg’s article.

‘Andrew Mude, a Kenyan economist, has a way of explaining satellites.

‘When he’s talking to pastoralists in his country’s north—people who roam the earth with a dozen head of cattle and very little else—he talks about the stars that don’t act like other stars.

‘“They’re actually taking pictures of the ground,” Mude says. Herders, a stargazing people, understand.

Mude has figured out a way those fake stars can help.
‘They can make it easier to assure rural Africans
that they can survive a drought.

‘Wherever land cannot grow crops—it is too cold, too dry, too mountainous—people keep animals. More than 100 million of the world’s poorest live this way.

‘Among the 50 million pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa, the average income is $2 per day and dropping.

‘. . . Satellites can tell us how much vegetation is on the ground. And we know how to use the density of ground cover to predict whether animals will starve. And that now allows herders to buy pre-emptive health insurance for their animals: At the end of a rainy season, they get a payment in time to buy fodder, water or veterinary services that will keep their cattle alive when a catastrophically bad dry season is foreseen. That’s cheaper and better than life insurance, which pays them after the cattle die.

Insurance that pays out when forage coverage drops—
known as index-based livestock insurance—is an elegant idea.

‘. . . [Andrew] Mude, who earned his doctorate at Cornell, is an economist and principal scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi. Last month, he was awarded the Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application. The award, a major prize in agricultural research, is given by the World Food Prize Foundation and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

‘Mude’s program began in one Kenyan county in 2010. Today, about 16,000 families are insured; most are in Kenya, and some are in southern Ethiopia.

‘The insurance works.

‘It is associated with fewer distress sales of livestock, more milk production and household income from milk, better child nutrition and less stress.

‘Compared with Kenya’s standard anti-poverty program, which is based on cash transfers, insurance is much more cost effective to scale up.

‘. . . Commercial insurers sell the livestock insurance. But the government is trying to spread this approach by beginning to shoulder some of the cost of premiums. Kenya expects to cover 80,000 households by 2019 in the Kenya Livestock Insurance Program. But that’s a tiny percentage of households that need it, and the program will cover only five cows per household.

On other problems that still need to be solved

‘What’s [hard] is helping [herders] understand that they should buy an invisible product that is likely to produce no financial benefit—and they should do it season after season. . . .

‘Shariah, or Islamic law, objects to the selling of risk, which can be considered the foundation of insurance. . . . Hassan Bashir, the founder and chief executive of Takaful Group . . . insures against every kind of loss, but livestock insurance is close to Bashir’s heart. . . .

‘“There can be rain in one area and none a kilometer away,” said [Chris] Barrett. “If it’s uncorrelated, it’s a lottery ticket, not an insurance policy. Andrew and I for half a dozen years have had the conversation: how do we make sure we’re selling insurance and not lottery tickets?”

‘Richard Kyuma, coordinator of Kenya’s government program, said . . . “There are areas where some locals are saying you should be paying, but the model is saying ‘no, it’s not the time to pay’. . . . If people are stressed and yet this product is not responding, then we can be in a terrible fix.” . . .

‘If livestock insurance spreads to new regions of the world, each will have to begin from scratch to gather data. . . . “Trying to meet demand for scale without reducing the rigor of careful design—this is a particular challenge for us,” said [Andrew] Mude. . . .’

On benefits already provided

[E]ven a flawed model has created real improvements for policy holders.
“It doesn’t do away with drought risk, but it still works . . .
to keep children better nourished and alive,
to improve the well-being of families.
—Chris Barrett

The solution, then, would appear to be in our stars, yes—and also in ourselves. Read the whole article by Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times: Up in the sky, help to keep Africans from starving, 8 Nov 2016.

Tina Rosenberg, a journalist and editorial writer for the New York Times, is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book author (her most recent book is Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World) and co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems, particularly by supporting journalists doing high-impact ‘solutions reporting’.

About Index-Based Livestock Insurance
Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) is a project developed in partnership by ILRI (Andrew Mude), Cornell University (Chris Barrett) and the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Assets and Market Access (BASIS) at the University of California at Davis (Michael Carter), and involving a whole range of other important stakeholders. The IBLI project has been funded by the World Bank Group, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the European Union (EU) and the Australian Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Further information on the wider program agenda is available at https://ibli.ilri.org/

Where livestock issues took centre stage at major fora this fall

The World Food Prize Foundation honours a Kenyan leader of the
Index-Based Livestock Insurance project with an award
Andrew Mude, a scientist leading an ‘Index-Based Livestock Insurance’ (IBLI) project offering the first drought-related livestock insurance to Africa’s pastoral dryland herders, received this year’s Norman E Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application. The announcement of this award, which is endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation, was made by Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, president of the World Food Prize Foundation, and celebrated at a special event hosted by Mude’s institute, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), at ILRI’s Nairobi, Kenya, headquarters, on 30 Aug 2016. The award itself was bestowed on Mude some six weeks later, at a ceremony held on 12 Oct 2016 in Des Moines, Iowa, during this year’s annual Borlaug Dialogue and International Symposium and 30th anniversary of Norman Borlaug’s establishment of the World Food Prize.

USAID-BIFAD honours three leaders of the
Index-Based Livestock Insurance project with an award
The same day (12 Oct 2016) and venue, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Board for International Food and Agricultural Development (BIFAD) gave its 2016 Award for Scientific Excellence to Chris Barrett, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University; Andrew Mude, PhD 2006, principal economist at ILRI; and Michael Carter, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis).

The UN Committee on World Food Security highlights
the central role of livestock in global food and nutrition security
A week later, at the 43rd session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS43), held at the Rome headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organzation of the United Nations (FAO), 17–21 Oct 2016, agreement was reached regarding a High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition Report on Sustainable Agricultural Development for Food Security and Nutrition: What Roles for Livestock? and a set of recommendations building on the report and a related policy convergence process was endorsed. (The recommendations are listed in an ILRI News blog article here.) Delia Grace, an ILRI scientist and program leader, served as a member of the High-Level Panel of Experts that produced the livestock report that was finalized and agreed at the Rome CFS43 meeting and other ILRI researchers made other substantive contributions.This CFS43 session was attended by delegates from 116 member states and 8 non-member states of the United Nations committee plus representatives from 10 UN agencies and bodies, 123 civil society organizations, 2 international agricultural research organizations (ILRI was one of these), 2 international and regional financial institutions, 86 private-sector associations and private philanthropic foundations (including 831 companies under the umbrella of the Private Sector Mechanism [PSM]), and 45 observers, all of whom were given opportunities to express their views on the report (ILRI’s remarks are here.)

This year’s UN climate change summit in Marrakech
includes livestock emissions in its discussions
Livestock greenhouse gas emissions and related topics are at long last being included in UN climate change discussions. The 22nd session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 22) of theUN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 12th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 12) , and the 1st session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA 1)—which was adopted in late 2015 and marks a turning point in work to build a zero-carbon world and went into effect on 4 Nov 2016—is  taking place in Marrakech, Morocco, this week and next (7–18 Nov 2016). At this week’s opening, on 8 Nov 2016, ILRI and partner organizations facilitated a science-policy dialogue on monitoring, reporting, and verification work to detect mitigation impacts in livestock production systems. Country experiences were shared to identify practical innovations for the collection and coordination of activity data and improved emission factors. This special side event was co-moderated by ILRI Livestock Systems and Environment program leader Polly Ericksen and by Lini Wollenberg, of the University of Vermont and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). (More news of that session will be published on this blog at a later date.)

The New York Times covers the story of
Index-Based Livestock Insurance
New York Times editorial writer Tina Rosenberg took a good long look at ILRI’s Index-Based Livestock Insurance scheme in a New York Times opinion piece, Up in the sky, help to keep Africans from starving, published 8 Nov 2016.

More selected IBLI | Mude | Borlaug Field Award
news clippings in 2016

Kenyan Bags 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research, Application at World Food Prize Event
africasciencenews.org | Eric Akasa | 10/12/2016
The accolade, named to honor the legendary crop scientist and Nobel Prize Winner, was presented to Mude by Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin at a special ceremony that included hundreds of agriculture experts from around the world attending the 2016 World Food Prize symposium in Iowa.

USAID BIFAD 2016 Award for Scientific Excellence goes to Cornell–ILRI–UC Davis team for developing novel livestock insurance for pastoral herders in East Africa
clippings.ilri.org | Susan MacMillan | 10/06/2016
‘A Cornell development economist and his partners won an international award for developing a form of livestock insurance that has already proved itself in pilot testing. Now that it is scaling up, the insurance could help hundreds of thousands of African herders stave off poverty in times of drought.

Economist, partners clinch USAID award for drought insurance
http://www.news.cornell.edu | Susan Kelley | 10/05/2016
A Cornell development economist and his partners won an international award for developing a form of livestock insurance that has already proved itself in pilot testing.

The journal ‘Science’ publishes Q&A with Borlaug Field Award winner Andrew Mude
clippings.ilri.org | Susan MacMillan | 09/05/2016
‘Andrew Mude, a senior economist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), created a program that protects pastoralists against losses from drought, an increasing scourge for nomadic communities in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia.

Kenyan wins Rockerfeller award for work in dry areas
http://www.busiweek.com | Samuel Nabwiiso | 09/04/2016
Dr. Andrew Mude was last week declared the winner of the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Q&A: Livestock insurance helps African herders survive droughts
http://www.sciencemag.org | Sophie Mbugua | 09/02/2016
A Kenyan economist has won the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award from the World Food Prize for an innovative program that provides pastoralists with livestock insurance.

Food prize puts Kenyan researcher on global map—Kenya’s ‘Business Daily’ newspaper
clippings.ilri.org | Susan MacMillan | 09/02/2016
‘When he was named winner of the 2016 World Food Prize’s Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application this week, he could barely hold back his emotions, as the reality of his achievement hit home.

Kenyan scientist wins world top prize for food research
http://www.the-star.co.ke | Agatha Ngotho | 09/01/2016
A Kenyan scientist was yesterday awarded a world prize for food research. Dr Andrew Mude (pictured) was announced the winner of the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application at the International Livestock Research Institute headquarters, Nairobi. He will receive Sh1 million next month during the World Food Prize international symposium in Iowa

Breaking the devastating impacts of drought in the Horn of Africa—Kenyan wins global agricultural research award
clippings.ilri.org | Susan MacMillan | 08/31/2016
”I am confident that with insurance and the related complementary services, the boom and bust cycle will come to an end,” said Mude, principal economist at the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research.

Kenya close to ending drought crises, says local scientist award winner
sde.co.ke Standard Digital | 08/31/2016
Kenya is on its way to breaking the devastating cycle of drought, poverty and hunger over the next decade, a leading scientist said as he was named winner of a prestigious award. Kenyan scientist Andrew Mude won the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application on Tuesday for developing livestock insurance . . . .

Kenyan Adjudged Winner of 2016 Norman Borlaug Award
http://www.newsghana.com.gh | Samuel Hinneh | 08/31/2016
Dr Andrew Mude developed insurance for never-before-insured communities whose livelihoods depend on herding cattle, goats, sheep and camels in the remote, arid and drought-prone lowlands of the Horn of Africa.

Kenyan economist Andrew Mude wins the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application
news.ilri.org | Susan MacMillan | 08/31/2016
It was announced yesterday (30 Aug 2016) in Nairobi, Kenya, that Andrew Mude has won the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application. Mude’s is developing insurance for never-before-insured communities whose livelihoods depend on herding cattle, goats, sheep and camels in the remote, arid and drought-prone lowlands of the Horn of Africa.

Kenyan Scientist Receives the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award- Crop Biotech Update ( 8/31/2016 )
http://www.isaaa.org | 08/31/2016
Dr. Andrew Mude, a young Kenyan scientist, is the winner of the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation. The award recognizes exceptional, science-based achievement in agriculture and food production by individuals under 40 who demonstrate intellectual courage, stamina, and determination in the fight to eliminate global hunger.

Kenyan wins global award for livestock innovation (video)
ntv.nation.co.ke | 08/31/2016
Video news clip

Pastoralists received Sh15M compensation following last year’s drought – CS
http://www.hivisasa.com — Garissa News | Joshua Khisa | 08/31/2016
Close to 12,000 households in the arid and semi-arid areas across the country have insured their livestock.  Those who insured their livestock are already enjoying the benefits of the product as according to Cabinet Secretary Judi Wakhungu, 5,012 pastoralists who insured their animals last year received Sh15 million compensation after their region suffered drought leading…

Kenyan Researcher Receives Named 2016 Borlaug Field Award Winner
http://www.agrimarketing.com | 08/31/2016
Dr. Andrew Mude was announced today as the winner of the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, Endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation, for his work in developing insurance for never-before-insured communities whose livelihoods depend on herding cattle, goats, sheep and camels in the remote, arid and drought-prone lowlands of the Horn…

Kenyan scientist Dr. Andrew Mude wins the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research—Potentash
http://www.potentash.com | Susan Mukami | 08/31/2016
In most parts of the Horn of Africa, drought, crop and livestock disease threaten food production; and the fact that livestock provides an essential source of protein and is an irreplaceable income to almost 1 billion poor people, more needs to be done to protect this precious resource.

Speeches | Nairobi, Kenya – Embassy of the United States
nairobi.usembassy.gov | Robert Godec | 08/30/2016
Thank you for inviting me here today. It’s always rewarding to spend time talking with and learning from researchers who are passionate about their disciplines.

Kenya close to ending drought crises, says local scientist award winner
http://www.reuters.com | Katy Migiro | 08/30/2016

How NASA satellites save Kenya’s nomads from bankruptcy during drought (seriously)
http://www.jinamoore.com | Jina Moore | 08/30/2016
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.

Kenya to extend livestock insurance to 14 counties
http://www.nation.co.ke | James Kariuki | 08/30/2016
The government will roll out a livestock insurance to all fourteen arid and semi-arid counties to help safeguard cattle during drought. Cabinet Secretary Judi Wakhungu said the uptake of the product had hit 11,800 households with an insured premium of Sh 5.3 billion since the beginning of the year.

Kenya close to ending drought – scientist
citizentv.co.ke | 08/30/2016
Kenya is on its way to breaking the devastating cycle of drought, poverty and hunger over the next decade, a leading scientist said as he was named winner of a prestigious award.

Kenya to extend livestock insurance to 14 counties
http://www.businessdailyafrica.com | James Kariuki | 08/30/2016
The government will roll out livestock insurance to all 14 arid and semi-arid counties to help safeguard cattle during drought.

Kenyan economist wins World Food Prize’s Borlaug award
http://www.desmoinesregister.com | Kelly McGowan | 08/30/2016
Andrew Mude, a researcher and economist dealing in international livestock, was named winner of the World Food Prize’s Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application.

Kenya close to ending drought crises, says local scientist award winner
uk.businessinsider.com | Katy Migiro | 08/30/2016
A Kenyan soldier from the Rapid Deployment Unit looks at a cow which is dying from hunger, a few hundred meters from the official boundary of the Kenya-Ethiopia border in northwestern Kenya

The World Food Prize Recognizes Kenyan Economist as Winner of the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, Endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation
http://www.worldfoodprize.org | Nicole Barreca | 08/30/2016
08/30/2016 Press Contact: Nicole Barreca, Director of Communications and Events nbarreca@worldfoodprize.org
The World Food Prize Recognizes Kenyan Economist as Winner of the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application….

Andrew Mude: 2016 recipient of the Borlaug Field Award
http://www.worldfoodprize.org | 08/30/2016
Andrew Mude, a senior economist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi, Kenya, was named the 2016 recipient of the “Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, Endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation.”  The announcement of his selection was made by Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, President of the World Food Prize Foundation.

Kenyan Wins 2016 Norman Borlaug Award For Field Research And Application
http://www.modernghana.com | Samuel Hinneh | 08/30/2016
A Kenyan research scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute based in Nairobi has won the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application for his work in providing insurance to livestock herders in East Africa’s drylands through innovative, state-of-the art technologies.

African livestock and agriculture departments promote new Kenya Livestock Insurance Programme (KLIP)
clippings.ilri.org | Susan MacMillan | 06/13/2016
Vincent Ngari and Richard Githaiga of the Departments of Livestock and Agriculture, while making presentations during the Technical Workshop on Agriculture Index Insurance at the College of Insurance, Nairobi, on Friday, advised farmers to take up the new Kenya Livestock Insurance…

Insurance helps Kenyan livestock herders cope with drought
clippings.ilri.org | Susan MacMillan | 04/15/2016
‘The index-based insurance program is run by the Kenya-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and funded by the British, U.S. and Australian governments and the European Union. The donors subsidize the cover to make it affordable for pastoralists.

Subsidised insurance bolsters Kenyan herders against drought
news.trust.org | Anthony Langat | 04/13/2016
At 7am, the Kubi-Qallo borehole near Goro Rukesa village in northern Kenya is already a hive of activity, as dozens of herders line up for their animals’ turn to drink at the watering trough.

Kenyan Farmers to Benefit from Innovative Insurance Program
http://www.worldbank.org | World Bank press release | 03/12/2016
The Government of Kenya today launched the Kenya National Agricultural Insurance Program, which is designed to address the challenges that agricultural producers face when there are large production shocks, such as droughts and floods.

Bringing insurance innovation to the pastoral areas of southern Ethiopia (ILRI 7.5-min video)
http://www.youtube.com | International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) | 01/05/2016
In the Borana region of Southern Ethiopia, drought has always been the greatest hazard faced by livestock herding families, but climate change and the increased frequency and intensity of drought are straining the viability of traditional coping methods.

From left to right: Jimmy Smith, director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI); Andrew Tuimur, principal secretary in Kenya’s State Department of Livestock; and Willy Bett, cabinet secretary for the Kenya Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries during a press conference held on 20 Feb 2017 announcing payments to more than 12,000 pastoral households under the Kenya Livestock Insurance Program (KLIP) (photo credit: ILRI/Dorine Odongo).

More than Ksh214 million is on tap for 12,000 pastoral households in six counties of northern Kenya through innovative policies that use satellite imagery to trigger payments for feed, veterinary supplies and water.

As an epic drought desiccates fields and forages in the Horn of Africa, Government of Kenya officials, in partnership with Kenyan insurers, today announced payments to over 12,000 pastoral households under a breakthrough livestock insurance plan—one that uses satellites to monitor vegetation available to livestock and triggers assistance for feed, veterinary medicines and even water trucks when animal deaths are imminent.

To avert future losses, nearly Ksh215 million  (nearly USD2.1 million) in insurance payouts across six counties will be made by the end of Feb 2017 through the Kenya Livestock Insurance Program (KLIP). Payments are pegged to measurements of forage conditions made via satellite for each area, and will range from Ksh1,450 (USD14) per pastoral household in areas that have suffered modest losses to Ksh29,400 (USD284) in areas where drought is particularly severe. The average payment is around Ksh17,800 (USD172) per pastoral household, directly reaching about 100,000 people. Pilot projects that preceded the program established payment levels linked to the state of grazing lands, with the goal of providing enough money to help pastoralists keep their animals alive until rains returns.

‘This is the biggest livestock insurance payout ever made under Kenya’s agricultural risk management program and the most important as well, because without their livestock, pastoralist communities would be devastated’, said Willy Bett, Cabinet Secretary for Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries. ‘This insurance program is not just an effective component of our national drought relief effort. It’s also a way to ensure that pastoralists can continue to thrive and contribute to our collective future as a nation.’

Jimmy Smith, ILRI director general, and Andrew Tuimur, principal secretary in Kenya’s State Department of Livestock, confer during the KLIP press conference yesterday (photo credit: ILRI/Dorine Odongo).

Livestock are a major component of the Kenyan economy. Between 2008 and 2011, livestock losses in Kenya accounted for 70 per cent of the USD12.1 billion in damages caused by drought.

In response to these major droughts, Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries has developed KLIP with technical assistance from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the World Bank Group, and Financial Sector Development (FSD) Kenya, as part of their national strategy to end drought emergencies. KLIP is administered as a public-private partnership with APA Insurance, which leads a consortium of seven Kenyan insurers—UAP, CIC, Jubilee, Heritage, Amaco and Kenya Orient, with backing from Swiss Re, a widely respected international reinsurer for agriculture.

KLIP is intended to provide a safety net for Kenyan herders, who for centuries have grazed their animals across vast stretches of arid and semi-arid lands. KLIP began with two counties in the short-rains season of 2015, Turkana and Wajir, and now covers pastoralists in an additional four counties: Mandera, Marsabit, Isiolo and Tana River.

KLIP is based on the internationally recognized ‘Index-Based Livestock Insurance’ model, which was developed several years ago by a team of agricultural economists from ILRI, Cornell University, the University of California at Davis and the World Bank Group, working in close cooperation with pastoralist communities. The signature feature of this novel insurance scheme is the use of satellite data to generate an index for grazing conditions, so that payments are triggered when conditions degrade below a certain critical level. The index eliminates the need for insurance agents to be out in the field monitoring forage and animals, which, given the remote regions involved, would make livestock insurance logistically and financially impossible to provide.

In Feb 2017, APA Insurance, on behalf of the insurance consortium, will disburse most payments directly to pastoralists’ bank accounts or to accounts accessed via mobile phones—an increasingly popular and convenient way to conduct financial transactions in Kenya, especially in the country’s most remote areas. For those without accounts, cheques
will be issued.

‘It’s important to make payments quickly and efficiently and before conditions deteriorate further, because we want these livestock-dependent communities to see index insurance as something they can trust to sustain their way of life’, said Ashok Shah, Group CEO of APA Insurance. ‘Now, it’s critical that others in the market also move quickly to supply pastoralists with livestock feed, water and veterinary medicines they can now afford.’

Lovemore Forichi, Head of Agriculture Reinsurance Africa said, ‘This program is a role model for the rest of Africa and beyond. The government and its partners have brought together the latest technological and financial tools from a group of committed and innovative private sector players. The payouts prove that this program is delivering a financial safety net where it is needed. Having worked in this field across the globe, KLIP highlights Kenya’s pioneering role in providing drought protection for its people.’

Kenya Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Willy Bett addresses a press conference announcing payments to more than 12,000 pastoral households under the Kenya Livestock Insurance Program (KLIP) (photo credit: ILRI/Dorine Odongo).

Currently, the Government of Kenya purchases cover on behalf of approximately 2,500 of the most vulnerable pastoral households in each of the six counties.

Kenyan officials are now working with colleagues in county governments to scale up the program and make KLIP coverage available to a wider range of pastoralists across all income levels.

‘These payouts demonstrate that KLIP works, and we now urge all pastoralists to make use of livestock insurance to cover themselves against drought. The government will look at ways to make this insurance accessible to all pastoralists’, said Dr Andrew Tuimur, principal secretary in the State Department of Livestock in the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock
and Fisheries.

The counties in Kenya targeted for KLIP payments are enduring one of the worst droughts to hit the Horn of Africa in a quarter century. The payments being dispatched this month are intended to help herders recover from the lack of precipitation during the so-called ‘short-rains’ period that ran from October to December 2016. If the drought continues during the ‘long-rains’ season, which usually runs from March to June, additional large payouts are likely.

In addition to the government-led consortium, other organizations have also been involved in delivering index-based livestock insurance for pastoralists. For example, Takaful Insurance of Africa, which launched the provision of a similar product in 2013, will this season be making payouts to over 2,000 households across six counties to the tune of close to Ksh10.5 million.

‘We are hopeful that we are writing a new chapter in the long and challenging history of one of the oldest forms of agriculture still practiced in the world today’, said Andrew Mude, a principal research scientist at ILRI whose contribution to the development of index-based livestock insurance earned him the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application.

‘It’s been a team effort’, Mude added.

‘This day would never have arrived without the partnership between the Government of Kenya, the KLIP Implementation Unit led by Richard Kyuma, private-sector players and a range of technical and development partners.‘

ILRI Director General Jimmy Smith (left) gives an interview to a journalist from The People Daily Newspaper at the KLIP press conference (photo credit: ILRI/Dorine Odongo).

Read more
The Standard (Kenya): Sh215m insurance payout offers relief to drought-hit pastoralists, 21 Feb 2017
Capital FM (Kenya): Pastoralists to receive Sh215mn in drought insurance payout, 20 Feb 2017
BBC News: In pictures: Kenyans share their dinner to save livestock, 19 Feb 2017
New York Times: On selling insurance (not lottery tickets) to Africa’s struggling (stargazing) livestock herders, 11 Nov 2016
Daily Nation (Kenya): Kenya to extend livestock insurance to 14 counties, 30 Aug 2016

More information
To request interviews with specific organizations or spokespeople, please reach out to the appropriate media contact below:

Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries
John Mwangi
Mobile: +254 722 582 248
Email: mbaumwangi@gmail.com

APA Insurance
Jackie Tonui
Head of Corporate Communications
Mobile: +254 722 415 619
Tel : +254 020 286 2000
Email: jackie.tonui@apollo.co.ke

World Bank
Keziah Muthembwa
Email: kmuthembwa@worldbank.org

International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)
Nancy Moss
Mobile: +254 729 991 028
Email : nmoss@burness.com

Takaful Insurance of Africa
Amina Farah
Mobile: +254 723 131 405
Email: Amina.farah@takafulafrica.com

More about KLIP
KLIP, the Kenya Livestock Insurance Program, is a Government of Kenya-funded drought insurance program for vulnerable pastoralists located in the arid and semi-arid (ASAL) counties of Kenya. KLIP is insured by a pool of seven leading Kenyan insurance companies. It is a world leading insurance scheme that utilizes technology and innovative insurance technical to bring livestock insurance to those who need it the most.

Pastoralism in Kenya
Most people in the drylands of Eastern Africa (often referred to as the ‘Horn of Africa[) live in pastoral communities where life revolves around herding livestock such as goats, cattle and sheep across vast and remote grazing areas (or ‘rangelands’) in search of forage and water. Pastoralists regularly move hundreds of kilometers with their stock, and this model of food production enables communities in the Horn of Africa to produce food in an otherwise unyielding environment. Over 50 million pastoralists live across sub-Saharan Africa, and an estimated 20 million of these live in the Horn of Africa. Pastoralism is important also to national economies. About 90 per cent of the meat consumed and 40 per cent of the entire livestock economy in Kenya and Ethiopia is generated by pastoral communities. The value of exports of livestock and livestock products from the Horn of Africa now exceeds US$1 billion annually, with most of these exports sourced from pastoralists. But every three to five years, severe droughts in northern Kenya result in huge numbers of livestock dying, mainly because of starvation and lack of water. Between 2008 and 2011, Kenya’s economy suffered USD12.1 billion in damages due to drought, over 70 per cent of which was due to livestock losses. About 10 per cent of Kenya’s national livestock herd died over this period, leading to a loss of livelihoods for thousands of pastoralists who had to rely on government and donor relief programs. With the impacts of climate change, droughts in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) of Kenya have in recent decades become more frequent, prolonged and severe, and pastoralists can no longer keep their animals alive by using traditional management practices centred around migration.

The case for livestock insurance
In northern Kenya, the average herding household holds 100 per cent of its productive assets in the form of livestock. On average, sales from livestock and livestock products constitute over 40 per cent of total household income. In comparison, close to 15 per cent of household income comes from food or cash aid. Drought-related livestock losses—caused by animals either starving to death or being sold-off for fear that they would otherwise perish—are the primary threat to pastoralists’ existence. Severe to catastrophic droughts, which account for 75 per cent of livestock deaths in the region, routinely leave pastoral communities destitute. During severe droughts in northern Kenya, starvation is the major cause of death of animals because of depletion of forage/grazing resources followed by lack of drinking water and diseases. During the 2011 drought, for example, herders in East Africa experienced livestock losses as high as 40 to 60 per cent. Livestock insurance can provide an incredibly valuable safety net by limiting drought-related livestock losses through early compensation that allows pastoralists to protect their assets before they start to die in large numbers. For livestock and agriculture in general, insurance is recognized across the globe as an essential hedge against the risks inherent to all forms of farming. Livestock keepers and farmers in the US, Europe, Latin America and India have access to various forms of insurance as a way to manage weather-related losses.

KLIP: Social protection through livestock insurance
In 2013 the incoming Jubilee government made a commitment to fund a drought insurance program for vulnerable pastoralists in the ASALs. The Government of Kenya (GoK) charged the State Department of Livestock, Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries (SDL-MALF) with developing the program and requested technical assistance from the World Bank Group (WBG) and its technical partners, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and Financial Sector Deepening (FSD).

KLIP is a public-private partnership between the GoK (through SDL-MALF) and a pool of seven Kenyan insurance companies, backed by expertise and financial support for a reinsurance partner and technical partners. KLIP builds on the experience of the ILRI designed Index-based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) program which is a voluntary retail forage availability drought index insurance policy underwritten by several insurers in the ASALs since 2010. KLIP is designed as a drought ‘Asset Protection’ cover which aims to make early payouts when natural grazing/forage resources are severely depleted to enable vulnerable pastoralists to purchase fodder and animal feed supplements to keep their core breeding animals alive until the drought has passed and grazing conditions return to normal. KLIP has two components:
1. Macro-level social protection cover for the most vulnerable pastoralist who are provided free insurance protection funded by government for five Tropical Livestock Units (TLUs) per pastoralist (termed a beneficiary), and
2. Voluntary retail sales to any pastoralist wishing to purchase KLIP drought cover. In order to make cover more affordable to pastoralists, the GoK is considering providing partial premium subsidies.

KLIP Component 1 is intended to complement the government’s other social protection programs such as the Hunger Safety Net Program in four counties (Mandera, Marsabit, Turkana and Wajir) and to contribute to the National Drought Management Agency’s drought risk management programs in the northern counties of Kenya.

KLIP: Progress to Date
KLIP’s first component was launched during the 2015 short rainy season (October–December) in Turkana and Wajir, covering a total of 5,013 pastoralists divided equally between both counties. During the 2016 short rainy season 2016, four additional counties (Mandera, Marsabit, Isiolo and Tana River) were added to the program with an average of between 2,000 and 2,500 pastoralists per county. KLIP has insured a total of 14,010 pastoralists across these six counties.

In 2015/16, KLIP incurred very small drought claims in two Insured Units in Wajir County. In the 2016/17 short rainy season, a very severe drought has affected much of northern Kenya and the KLIP policy has triggered drought payouts in 62 (88%) of the 70 Insured Units across the six counties, with total payouts valued at nearly KSh. 215 million being due to 12,064 pastoralists (86% of all insured pastoralists).

Frequently Asked Questions
Is livestock insurance a new concept?
Pasture drought satellite index insurance has been implemented for commercial cattle ranching in Spain, the USA, and Canada since the turn of the century. Based on these principles, ILRI designed the first satellite forage-drought index insurance cover for semi-nomadic pastoralists in northern Kenya in 2009 and then in Ethiopia starting in 2012. Both programs are voluntary retail sales to individual pastoralists. KLIP has built on the IBLI experience.

KLIP Component 1, however, represents a new approach to providing drought livelihood protection and drought resilience building to large numbers of vulnerable pastoralists who are too poor to buy insurance. It is a macro-level insurance cover purchased by the GoK which is the Insured policy holder and which has agreed to fund 100% of the component 1 premiums. Component 1 protects large numbers of vulnerable pastoralists (termed beneficiaries) in each county who are targeted and selected by the County Administrations and departments of livestock in collaboration with community leaders.

What does KLIP cover?
The sum insured is calculated on the basis of the costs of supplementary feed requirements to maintain one TLU for 12 months and is currently valued at KSh. 14,000 per TLU. Therefore, for each pastoralist who has protection for five TLU, the maximum value they will receive in the event that the policy triggers a 100% payout in an insurance year is 5 x KSh. 14,000 or KSh. 70,000 per beneficiary.

KLIP provides drought protection over two cover periods, the long rainy season from March to June, with 58% of the sum insured or Ksh. 40,600 per pastoralist allocated to this season, and the short rainy season from October to December, with 42% of the sum insured or KSh. 29,400 allocated to this second season. KLIP does not insure against the death of livestock. However, by making timely payouts during droughts it can help pastoralists to reduce mortality levels in their herds.

How are the KLIP Component 1 beneficiaries chosen?
Selection criteria include: 1) the pastoralist must own a minimum of 5 TLUs and depend upon livestock for their primary source of income; 2) they must not be a beneficiary of the HSNP cash transfer program; and 3) they should be chosen because they are identified in their communities as being vulnerable pastoralists.

Targeting and selection of pastoralists is a task which is carried out by the County Governments, their departments of livestock extension, and the local community leaders. SDL does not have the staff or resources to be able to monitor the quality of the selection process. Every attempt is made to ensure that pastoralists are selected from communities throughout the county and that equal weighting is given to the numbers of pastoralists selected in each ward and village.

What ‘index’ does KLIP measure and why?
KLIP uses satellite data of vegetation cover to assemble an index of seasonal forage availability/scarcity, called the Normalized Differenced Vegetative Index (NDVI). NDVI was a natural choice for the KLIP product given that livestock in pastoral production systems depend almost entirely on available forage for their nutrition, and given that NDVI serves as a strong indicator of the vegetation available in the area for the livestock to consume.

NDVI also fits a number of the prerequisites required for a data source to serve as an insurable index: it is cheap (in this case free) to procure; neither the insurer nor the insured can feasibly manipulate it; it is an objective measure; and it is auditable. NDVI readings over an insurance unit and across a season are averaged, aggregated and standardized across time to derive the index.

How does KLIP know when to payout?
When the index signals that forage conditions have deteriorated to the point where animals are becoming malnourished, KLIP triggers payouts to enable the pastoralists to purchase supplementary feeds to protect their livestock assets against starvation. The ‘trigger level’ for the index—the threshold at which payouts must be made—is determined according to the degree of risk exposure coverage provided. At the GoK’s request, they are purchasing cover with the KLIP Trigger which opens the policy for a payout set at the 20th percentile of seasonal total forage availability; essentially this means that the contract pays out on average once every five seasons or once every two and a half years.

What payouts have been made by KLIP since launch in 2015/16
In 2015/16 KLIP precipitation levels in Turkana and Wajir were average in the short rains and there were no forage scarcity drought related payouts in that season. In the subsequent 2016 long rains, a small number of drought payouts were triggered in two Insured Units in Wajir, valued at KSh. 4.1 million.

In 2016/17, the short rainy season has experienced the worst droughts in the past 16 years as measured by the NDVI index. Claims payouts will be due to 12,064 pastoralists or 86% of the total of 14, 010 pastoralists who are protected under the Component 1 cover purchased by government. The total calculated payouts amount to KSh. 214,700.00 or an average of Ksh. 17,800 per beneficiary. The range in payouts is from a low of KSh. 1,400 per pastoralist to the maximum payout of KSh. 29,400 per beneficiary.

The APA-led pool of coinsurers will be settling these payouts in February 2017 to the 12,064 pastoralists, about two thirds of whom have individual bank accounts, or M-Pesa accounts thereby facilitating direct electronic transfer to their accounts. For the remaining one third, payments will be made by cheque in the name of the beneficiary. For these pastoralists, SDL is seeking the help of the county administrations in delivering the cheques to the pastoralists as quickly as possible.

Who are the key partners?
Government:
State Department of Livestock, Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries
Insurance companies:
APA Insurance Ltd.
UAP Insurance
CIC Insurance
Jubilee Insurance
Amaco Insurance
Heritage Insurance
Kenya Orient
Reinsurance partner:
Swiss Re
Technical Assistance partners:
World Bank Group
International Livestock Research Institute
Financial Sector Deepening

A livestock carcass in northern Kenya, which has suffered prolonged drought (photo via Flickr by CIAT/Neil Palmer).

Widespread drought conditions in the Horn of Africa have intensified since the failure of the Oct–Dec 2016 rains. Areas of greatest concern cover much of Somalia, northeast and coastal Kenya, southeast Ethiopia and the Afar region, and South Sudan, which faces a serious food crisis due to protracted insecurity. One focus of the East African-headquartered International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is to help developing-country livestock communities enhance their resilience in the face of recurring droughts. ILRI belongs to CGIAR—a global research partnership of 15 centres and their partners working yo reduce poverty, enhance food and nutrition security and improve natural resources and ecosystem services.

Below are some livestock examples of what CGIAR/ILRI have done to help ameliorate the impacts of the on-going drought in the Horn.

Pastoral livestock insurance
A high-profile example of ILRI’s work to help the Horn’s dryland communities better cope with drought is an ‘index-based livestock insurance (IBLI)’ scheme, for which the Kenya government made a recent announcement (21 Feb 2017): Record payouts being made by Kenya Government and insurers to protect herders facing historic drought. This novel livestock insurance approach has been applied in the drylands of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia but not yet in South Sudan or Somalia, which are bearing the brunt of the impacts of the current on-going drought in the Horn of Africa.

Livestock master plan
Over the last 20 years, the Ethiopian government has prioritized the transformation of the agricultural sector, yet the absence of a livestock roadmap has hindered implementation. The potential benefits of a comprehensive Livestock Master Plan are large. With a relatively modest sum, less than USD400 million over five years, a plan developed by the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture with the support of ILRI aims to reduce poverty among 2.36 million livestock-keeping households, helping family farms move to market-oriented commercial operations. Beyond the direct benefits it provides rural families, implementation of the Livestock Master Plan should lower food prices for poor urban dwellers. Development of Ethiopia’s Livestock Master Plan was overseen by a high-level technical advisory committee comprising directors of key Ministry of Agriculture—Livestock State Ministry departments and institutes as well as representatives from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency, the Ethiopian Society of Animal Production and the Ethiopian Veterinary Association.

Developing livestock markets
Livestock are central to livelihoods as well as national economies in this heavily livestock-dependent region.

Mitigating drought disasters must factor in the development of the livestock sector, including protecting stock from starvation and disease.
—Shirley Tarawali, ILRI assistant director general

In Somaliland, for example, where livestock form the backbone of the economy (livestock production accounts for about 60% of the Somaliland’s gross domestic product, 70% of its employment opportunities, 85% of its export earnings and 15% of its total government revenue), ILRI has a project investigating ways to grow livestock markets (Saudi livestock market requirements, implications for Somaliland) and a livestock marketing information system developed by Terra Nuova and ILRI improved access to animal marketing information and increased trading in livestock in Somaliland.

Targeting resilience investments
A former CGIAR initiative, the Technical Consortium for Building Resilience to Drought in the Horn of Africa, provided support to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in developing regional and national investment programs for the long-term development and resilience of populations living in the Horn of Africa. Hosted by CGIAR (ILRI, World AgroForestry Centre and the International Food Policy Research Institute) and housed at ILRI, the Technical Consortium was established in 2011 as a knowledge management and research platform that combined science and development best practices to serve IGAD and its seven member states—Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda—as well as development partners and donors. The consortium helped align the work of research and knowledge institutions with country development priorities. It harnessed CGIAR research and other knowledge on interventions to enhance drought resilience. And it provided IGAD and its member states with evidence and technical support for planning investments aiming to enhance the resilience of communities in arid and semi-arid lands.

Pastoralists in Tanzania engaging in participatory mapping of rangeland resources (photo credit: ILRI/Fiona Flintan).

Managing interactions between environmental change and livestock systems through interventions such as sustainable rangeland use and improved land governance is a key focus of the Sustainable Livestock Systems program of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). The aim is to develop and promote research-based interventions that will protect and promote rational resource allocation and use, thereby improving livestock keepers’ livelihoods and resilience.

Through the International Land Coalition (ILC) Rangelands Initiative, the global component of which ILRI coordinates and supports, ILRI is taking its research agenda on adaptation and resilience a notch higher at the ongoing Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty conference, the theme of which this year is ‘Responsible Land Governance—Towards an Evidence-Based Approach’. ILRI is one of the major partners supporting this premier global forum on land governance.

Fiona Flintan, a rangelands governance scientist at ILRI, is an author of three presentations at the conference and today, 24 Mar 2017, is leading a masterclass on the following topic: ‘Towards sustainable pastoralism through improving governance of pastoral lands: Implementation of the FAO VGGT Governance of Pastoral Lands’. Also today, Flintan is leading a meeting to deliberate on a call for an ‘International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists’. These deliberations are being done in collaboration with other ILC members and partners including: Coalition of European Lobbies for Eastern African Pastoralism (CELEP), FAO-Pastoralist Knowledge Hub, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)-World Initiative for Sustainable Pastoralism, Rangelands Partnership, United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), World Bank and others.

ILRI has made considerable strides in facilitating inclusive participation of stakeholders to achieve sustainable rangeland use and to build rangeland resilience. For example, through the Sustainable Rangeland Management Project in Tanzania, ILRI has assisted nine villages to carry out village land-use planning and successfully pilot implementation of joint village planning across three of these villages, leading to the protection through certification of a shared grazing area called OLENGAPA, found in Kiteto district, Manyara region. Read more about this here.

Among other initiatives, ILRI’s research agenda in this area focuses on pro-poor land policy development and implementation. This includes institutional and governance dimensions for which partnerships with national governments and agencies as well as with non-governmental organizations are fundamental. Most recently, government–government dialogues have been facilitated between Ethiopia and Tanzania to promote and strengthen peer-to-peer sharing and learning among states.

This World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty has provided a much-needed forum to share lessons and identify opportunities for scaling up experiences for extensive adoption. The ILC Rangelands Initiative provided technical and financial support to eight other papers for the conference. ILRI and the World Bank will produce a joint proceedings of the rangeland papers delivered at the conference.

For more information on the Sustainable Rangeland Management Project, contact Fiona Flintan: f.flintan [at] cgiar.org

Download reports from the ILC Rangelands Initiative here

BecA-ILRI Hub scientist Sita Ghimire describes the advantages of Brachiaria grass to Claes Kjellström, senior policy specialist at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), in Nairobi, Kenya (photo credit: BecA-ILRI Hub/Marvin Wasonga).

The original article on which this is based was written by Ethel Makila, communications specialist for the BecA-ILRI Hub.

Results of a recent study by the Biosciences eastern and central Africa-International Livestock Research Institute Hub (BecA-ILRI Hub) and the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), both based in Nairobi, indicate that the many people farming in Kenya’s semi-arid regions would profit in many ways from planting drought-tolerant Brachiaria grass.

The study shows that Brachiaria grass improves not only the productivity of dairy and other livestock but also the health of soils. With Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands making up 83 per cent of the country’s land area, the planting of Brachiaria grass in dry areas could have great impacts. Kenya’s drylands have marginal to low potential for crop production, not only because of lack of sufficient or regular rainfall, but also because the soils of these drylands are low in plant nutrients and prone to erosion.

This collaborative research of the BecA-ILI Hub and KALRO demonstrates that cultivation of Brachiaria grass improves soil quality by increasing the amount of plant available carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous.

The study, Effects of Brachiaria grass cultivars on soil microbial biomass carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous in soils of the semi arid eastern Kenya, is one of 24 papers recently published by KALRO on how Brachiaria grass helps farmers better cope with drought, the increases in milk and meat yields in animals fed Brachiaria grass, the central role this grass plays in improving soil quality, and the importance of establishing seed production systems to make Brachiaria seeds more available to farmers and profitable for farmers to grow.

Sita Ghimire, a co-author and co-editor of the study and a senior scientist at the BecA-ILRI Hub leading its Brachiaria research, says this study is a culmination of pioneering research on the forage in East Africa.

‘Brachiaria has been used to transform livestock production in South America,’ says Ghimire; ‘however, despite the immense benefits it demonstrated in that region, the true potential of this grass is yet to be realized in its motherland, Africa.’

Livestock production already accounts for 10 per cent of the gross domestic product of Kenya, where a growing human population, increasing affluence and concomitant changes in food habits are increasing demand for livestock products. With more than 70 per cent of all the livestock in Kenya being raised in the country’s vast arid and semi-arid lands, research like this, to develop forage options that will increase and sustain livestock productivity in the face of climate change, is badly needed.

Sita Ghimire is a senior scientist at the BecA-ILRI Hub, which gratefully acknowledges Swedish funding of its project on Climate-smart Brachiaria grasses for improving livestock production in East Africa.

Read the paper: EM Gichangi, DMG Njarui, M Gatheru, KW Ndungu-Magiroi and Sita Ghimire, 2016. Effects of Brachiaria grass cultivars on soil microbial biomass carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in soils of the semi arid eastern Kenya. In: DMG Njarui, EM Gichangi, Sita Ghimire and RW Muinga (eds.), 2016. Climate Smart Brachiaria Grasses for Improving Livestock Production in East Africa—Kenya Experience: Proceedings of a Workshop Held in Naivasha, Kenya, 14–15 Sep 2016. Nairobi, Kenya: Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization: 179–193.

Read the original article written by Ethel Makila and posted on the BecA-ILRI Hub blog site: Climate-smart Brachiaria grass to help Kenyan farmers withstand global warming effects, 20 Apr 2017.

More than 2,250 pastoralists received insurance payouts following the extremely poor rains this year in southern Ethiopia.

More than 2,250 pastoralists received insurance payouts following the extremely poor rains this year in southern Ethiopia. Low levels of rainfall have led to the loss of approximately 300,000 livestock in 2017 in the Borana zone of the southern Oromia region. The insurance payouts of more than ETB 5.233 million (USD 220,000) was the largest-ever micro-insurance indemnity made in Ethiopia. Each insured pastoralist received an average of ETB 2,255 (USD 96), which will allow the herders to purchase feeds for their surviving animals and to restock their herds.

Pastoralists in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia have been insured by an index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) scheme devised in 2008 by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and its technical partners at Cornell University and the University of California at Davis. The Ethiopian component of this project was underwritten by the Oromia Insurance Company and introduced to eight districts of Borana in August 2012.

‘This project is protecting farmers in southern Ethiopia’, said Siboniso Moyo, the ILRI director general’s representative in Ethiopia. ‘Our evaluation conducted in Kenya and Ethiopia indicated that in times of drought households possessing livestock insurance are less likely than others to reduce their nutritional intake. We also found that insured households make fewer distress sales of livestock assets and rely less on food aid than non-insured households. This payment is proof that the index-based livestock insurance system works here in Ethiopia.’

Andrew Mude, ILRI’s IBLI project leader, stated that this year’s payout is the fifth, and largest, since the establishment of the project in Ethiopia in 2012. It took place on 5 September 2017 in Moyale town, the second largest in Borana. The number of insured farmers has steadily increased since the project’s inception. Since August 2012, more than 6,000 pastoralists from 10 districts throughout Borana have purchased the IBLI product.

IBLI-insured pastoralists receive a payout based on the numbers of livestock predicted to die when a season’s available forage falls below a certain level, as assessed by satellite imagery. Such insurance payouts protect pastoralists from having to make distress sales of livestock and to take other drastic measures to generate emergency cash for food and other essentials.

‘Insured households are seeing that for a relatively small investment, their livelihoods are much better protected’, said Masresha Taye, IBLI’s project coordinator in Ethiopia. ‘Insuring one small ruminant costs less than ETB56 a year, a head of cattle less than ETB333 and more expensive camels less than ETB560 per animal. In contrast, severe droughts—which in recent decades have become more frequent and more intense in the Horn of Africa—have caused catastrophic herd losses. This insurance payment helps herders invest both in their animals and in their families’.

These initial results suggest that IBLI provides Ethiopia’s pastoral livestock herders with a valuable safety net in times of drought. IBLI has managed to help Ethiopia’s herders raise their livestock productivity and income both. Households having purchased IBLI, for example, made higher veterinary expenditures than non-insured households to maintain their livestock productivity, thereby increasing the total and per head incomes they received from milk sales.

The ILRI-led IBLI project works closely with the Oromia Insurance Company, which is underwriting the insurance policies, with Kifiya Financial Technology Plc, which is providing digital financial service support, and with research partners at Cornell University and the University of California at Davis. IBLI is funded by the United States Agency for International Development and the Australian foreign aid organization AusAID. The UK Department for International Development funds a local IBLI partner, Community Initiative Facilitation and Assistance Ethiopia, to provide livestock insurance at discounted rates to pastoralists in two Borana districts.

On 5 Dec 2017 Alessandra Galiè (centre) received the Elsevier Atlas award for publishing a research paper with outstanding potential for impacting people’s lives. She stands here with Elsevier associate publisher Virginia Prada López and Wageningen crop systems professor Paul Struik, one of Galiè’s co-authors and PhD supervisors (photo credit: CGIAR).

Alessandra Galiè, a social scientist specializing in gender issues in agricultural research who now works in Nairobi, Kenya, at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), conducted her doctoral research in Aleppo, Syria, at ILRI’s sister CGIAR institution, the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). This week Galiè received a prestigious award for an academic paper she published documenting how ICARDA’s participatory barley breeding program in pre-war Syria impacted women’s empowerment. Galiè wrote the paper with her PhD supervisors Janice Jiggins and Paul C. Struik, both at Wageningen University & Research, in the Netherlands; and Stefania Grando and Salvatore Ceccarelli, in Syria.

Each month an external advisory board selects a single Atlas article from research published in more than 2,500 journals to recognize research that could significantly impact people’s lives around the world. The Elsevier Atlas Award was presented to Galiè on 6 Dec 2017 during the annual scientific conference of the CGIAR Collaborative Platform for Gender Research, being held this week (5–8 Dec 2017) at the KIT Royal Tropical Institute, in Amsterdam.

Extracts from the award-winning paper follow.

From the abstract
‘Building on the empirical findings of a six-year study (2006–2011) undertaken in the context of a participatory barley breeding (PBB) programme in pre-war Syria, this paper establishes the links between women’s empowerment, seed improvement through [participatory plant breeding] and seed governance vis-à-vis household food security. The study shows how the programme enhanced the empowerment of the respondent women and how gender-blind seed governance regimes at national and international levels restricted the empowerment of these women ultimately affecting the pillars of food security.’

From the introduction
‘The study explored in depth the process of empowerment as perceived by twelve Syrian women from ten households in three villages as they became involved in the [participatory plant breeding] programme. Changes in empowerment were monitored on the basis of indicators selected in collaboration with the respondent women.’

Syrian girl in a barley field (photo credit: ICARDA/Alessandra Galiè).

From the conceptual framework

Sen (1990) and Kabeer (1999) see empowerment as a process that can enhance the individuals’ capacity of self-determination—that is their capability of living the lives that they have a reason to value.

‘The empowerment discourse has focused on empowerment as an individual process (see, Eyben and Napier-Moore, 2009), as relational process with changes in power relations (Drydyk, 2013) or as changes in structures or institutions of power (Tsikata and Darkwah, 2014; Kilby, 2006). Kabeer (2012) emphasises that women’s empowerment must entail both institutional and individual change, that is: change in women’s consciousness, in their self-perception and in their relationship with others; change in the norms, conventions and legislation that regulate women’s rights, circumstances and their ability to make choices.’

[This study] adopts three principles of self-determination identified by Santarius and Sachs (2007): ‘recognition’, ‘distribution of resources’, and ‘access to opportunities’.

From the results and discussion

The findings show that irrespective of the gender of the respondent ‘men are considered to be the farmers and to have farming knowledge’, and ‘farming is man’s work’.

‘The respondent women were generally under-valued as farmers by both men and women, at the household and community levels. At the same time the findings reveal more nuanced gender performances between idealised and actual gender roles. The latter were susceptible to changes in daily life, based on household needs and circumstances, idealised gender identities as well as social status considerations. Young women worked as daily labourers both on and off farm; a young woman from Ajaz managed the family farm (i.e., she worked the land, sourced the inputs, sold the produce, and took decisions about the farm management) because her men folk were either too old or abroad. Deviance from behaviours considered appropriate for women was often publicly denied but practically accepted when performed with due respect to the consensus norms. This was the case of the abovementioned young woman from Ajaz who maintained that her farm was managed by her men folk. Similarly, an old woman from Souran attributed the farm management to her sons only when they were present in the room or other men were listening to our discussion. Otherwise, she stated that in her family she was the most knowledgeable about farming and was therefore in charge of it—as she demonstrated on various occasions during this fieldwork. . . .

‘The findings, therefore, show that the potential of [participatory plant breeding] in supplying varieties responding to the needs of both women and men farmers were undermined by the lack of both a release system for varieties selected by farmers in Syria and of a gender-sensitive international legislation protecting farmers’ rights to varieties.

This evidence highlights also how customary rules, coupled with a lack of gender-equal national legislation, can hinder women’s capability to assert their role and knowledge in farming, and to claim new spaces in revenue-generating and decision-making activities such as the sale of barley and variety selection through [participatory plant breeding].

‘The findings showed that a gender-sensitive [participatory plant breeding] provided the participating women farmers with opportunities for empowerment by increasing their recognition of women as farmers, enhancing their contribution to the household economy, supporting their access to information and relevant seed, and impacting on their decision making in agriculture (Galiè, 2013a). . . .

ILRI gender scientist Alessandra Galiè participating in ILRI’s Institutional Planning Meeting in 2016 (photo credit: ILRI/Apollo Habtamu).

‘The study further shows how, by accessing new public spaces and information, and open discussion of women’s roles in farming and [participatory plant breeding], new understanding of empowerment and self-determination arose, that in some cases led to a questioning of traditional gender models.

. . . [G]iven the limited set of life opportunities that the respondents perceived for themselves, it is argued [that this study’s] participatory nature, its activities targeted to empower women, and gender-sensitive methods, rather than seed improvement activities per se—opens up novel opportunities to experience new contexts and conceive different life-paths. . . .

‘Whether this can translate into actual changes in women’s circumstances is a longer term issue that this study did not assess. . . .

‘The study showed that only the intervention of the [participatory plant breeding’s] programme’s managers to rectify gender-discriminating behaviours at both village and programme levels limited the marginalisation of women from benefit sharing. It was this top-down support that transformed gender-discriminatory practices among PPB participants in opportunities for the women farmers to acquire new awareness of unequal treatment and of their right to demand fair rules. Only with the backing of the programme could they voice their demands and fear less for backlashes. . . . [The study] argues for the need to include gender considerations in international legislation regulating access to seed. . . .’

Alessandra Galié with a farmer participating in her research in pre-war Syria (photo credit: ICARDA).

This work was supported by the CGIAR Participatory Research and Gender Analysis Programme and by Wageningen University.

Read the whole award-winning paper: Women’s empowerment through seed improvement and seed governance: Evidence from participatory barley breeding in pre-war Syria, by Alessandra Galiè (ILRI), Janice Jiggins, Paul Struik, Stefania Grando and Salvatore Ceccarelli, Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences 81, 2017. (http://hdl.handle.net/10568/79922)

Read about the award and paper: Plant breeding for gender equality: How a plant breeding program empowered women in Syria, by Lucy Goodchild van Hilten, on the Elsevier Atlas site, 6 Dec 2017.

Read about ILRI’s gender research and see ILRI’s Policies, Gender and Impact blog.

Selected related posts on ILRI’s corporate News and Clippings blogs
Capitalizing on women in livestock development—ILRI’s Jimmy Smith and Isabelle Baltenweck speak out, 9 Jul 2017.
Women, livestock ownership and markets: Bridging the gender gap in eastern and southern Africa, 8 Mar 2014.
Women and livestock: Why gender matters are BIG matters, 7 Mar 2014.

Over the past several weeks,
illegal attempts to grab land
have escalated at Kapiti Plains Estate
(now known as Kapiti research station),
located about 60 km southeast
of Nairobi along Mombasa Road,
in Kenya’s Machakos County.
Members of groups involved in the
illegal sales have started trespassing
and building illegal structures
on Kapiti research station.

No land at Kapiti is for sale.

Who owns Kapiti?

Kapiti has been wholly owned, managed and operated by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) for three decades. ILRI is a not-for-profit international research centre headquartered in Kenya. It is a member of the CGIAR system of 15 global agricultural research centres and their partners conducting research for a food-secure future. For several decades, ILRI has been working closely with national governments and ministries in conducting research to improve the livelihoods and lives of small-scale livestock keepers in Africa and Asia.

What is Kapiti used for?

Kapiti is an ILRI research station located on 32,000 acres of semi-arid rangeland in southeastern Kenya. Kapiti land and facilities are operated solely for public good research; this is not a commercial ranch and ILRI makes no profit from it.

The 80 ILRI staff working at Kapiti maintain for research purposes about 2,500 head of Kenya’s native and popular Boran beef cattle, 1,200 native Kenyan red Maasai and exotic Dorper sheep, and 250 Galla goats, which are native to northern Kenya.

The different breeds and types of livestock are kept at Kapiti to conduct research on animal health and productivity for the benefit of millions of farmers, herders and pastoralists in Kenya and across Africa and Asia.

As one of the few as yet unfragmented rangelands in the region, Kapiti also is a safe haven for large numbers of wildlife. Serving as a critical wildlife corridor for migratory mammals, Kapiti helps to maintain the fragile and unique Athi-Kapiti-Kaputei ecosystem of Kenya’s Southern Conservancy Area, with the internationally acclaimed Nairobi National Park being a centrepiece of this ecosystem.¹ This park’s wildlife regularly disperses throughout the ecosystem, with more wildlife on any given day found on pastoral grazing land outside the park. Indeed, some 12,000 head of wild mammals were counted on ILRI’s Kapiti research station in a recent aerial survey—many more wildlife than were in the park itself at that time.

The main reason for ILRI’s acquisition of Kapiti was to produce ‘clean’ (disease-free) animals for controlled livestock vaccine trials. Most of East Africa’s ruminant livestock are raised on tropical drylands. Because the number of animals needed for vaccine trials is large and the number of animals that drylands such as Kapiti can support (called a ‘stocking rate’ or ‘carrying capacity’) is low, large tracts of land are required for this kind of animal health research. Kapiti’s size is in line with that of other drylands research stations, such as Kenya’s Kiboko Research Station, which is larger than Kapiti.

Kapiti is essentially a living laboratory for studying and improving livestock production in Africa’s tropical drylands. It’s a place where ILRI and its Kenyan and other research partners can develop better breeds and feeds and find new ways to treat devastating animal diseases in the confidence that what works at Kapiti will work for millions of livestock keepers tending animals in similar environments.

After ILRI bought Kapiti in the 1980s, most of the animals raised there were used in intensive, long-term research to develop vaccines against tropical livestock diseases. Later, innovative livestock genetics and breeding work was added to this animal health research. Over the last 15 years or so, research at Kapiti has continued to expand in both volume and scope and now includes livestock feeding trials and environmental assessments of African livestock production systems. The latter investigations are determining the first-ever reliable estimations of greenhouse gas emissions from African livestock and ways for livestock keepers to better cope with, and mitigate, climate change.

How is Kapiti benefiting Kenyans?

Kenya’s livestock sector is primed for growth. Demand for meat and milk is rising rapidly in Kenya and is estimated to nearly double by mid-century. The livestock sector today contributes more than 40% to Kenya’s agricultural gross domestic product, at a total value of KES515 billion, and employs 50% of the country’s agricultural labour force.

But because climate change is expected to make much of Kenya’s climate drier and harsher in years to come, it is critical that Kenya, some 83% of which consists of arid and semi-arid lands, prepares itself with research that reveals new ‘climate-smart’ approaches for using its extensive dryland pastoral grazing systems to support livestock-dependent communities. Kapiti is serving as a major centre for this type of research.

Smallholder Kenyan dairy incomes: Past work at Kapiti Research Station helped increase incomes for Kenya’s small-scale milk producers, processors and sellers and now generates KES3.3 billion in related benefits to Kenya annually as well as providing thousands of jobs for Kenyan youth and labourers.

Vaccines for Kenyan livestock: The research by local and international scientists also contributed to development, production and dissemination of a widely used and highly effective vaccine against East Coast fever in cattle, which kills an unvaccinated African animal every 30 seconds. Today, researchers at Kapiti are conducting safety trials of vaccines against other animal diseases such as Rift Valley fever, which is vital for both livestock and the 50 million East Africans also threatened by this disease; the last outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Kenya, in 2006–7, killed more than 100 people and cost the country KES3.1 billion. The researchers are also testing a promising new vaccine against malignant catarrhal fever, a herpes virus occurring in Kenya’s Kapiti and Masai Mara regions that is transmitted from wildebeest to sheep and cattle grazing locations where wildebeest have recently calved, depositing the virus. The experimental vaccine, based on a viral isolate from Kenya, induced immunity in 80 per cent of animals vaccinated at Kapiti in 2016; data from further studies at Kapiti will support the commercialization of this vaccine.

The 2011 eradication from the world of rinderpest, a cattle plague that has devastated the economies of whole regions, is an example of just how important animal health research is to reducing the huge burden livestock diseases continue to place on Kenya and other tropical developing countries. With the last reported outbreak of rinderpest anywhere in the world occurring in Kenya’s Meru National Park in 2001, the Africa Union-InterAfrican Bureau for Animal Resources estimates the total benefits of eradicating rinderpest from Kenya to be KES44.7 billion.

Kenyan livestock breed improvements: Having recently discovered that a Kenyan Boran animal is resistant to East Coast fever, ILRI researchers are working to ensure the selection of that desirable trait in the country’s Boran breeding programs. And the researchers are working with local communities to cross-breed high-yielding exotic Dorper sheep with drought- and disease-resistant local red Maasai sheep² to help Kenyan farmers deal with climate change.

Kenyan livestock-wildlife ecosystems: The traditional co-existence of livestock and wildlife at Kapiti has also enabled ILRI scientists working closely for many years with a local Maasai community at Kitengela, in neighbouring Kajiado County, to find ways to reduce wildlife-human conflicts and to increase the benefits wildlife provide livestock herders. Besides wildlife tourism, such benefits include an ambitious Wildlife Conservation Lease program paying pastoral land owners not to fence, develop or sell their land. The latter program depended on the work of a highly participatory ILRI-led research project improving livestock production in the Kitengela region and producing maps showing which lands were fenced and which remained open, maps that were subsequently used by the local Maasai council to develop a ‘master land-use plan’ for better managing this region’s unique land, livestock and wildlife resources.^{3, 4, 5}

Livestock insurance for Kenyan pastoralists: Among many other research projects benefiting Kenya and Kenyans directly, ILRI has been pioneering jointly with the Government of Kenya and its ministries innovative insurance schemes protecting poor pastoralists in northern Kenya against livestock losses due to drought. A recently initiated government-run Kenya Livestock Insurance Program based on ILRI’s pilot insurance project has so far paid out about KES547 million to over 20,000 pastoralists in the region.⁶

Kenyan livestock and climate change: Researchers are also using Kapiti to determine the greenhouse gas emissions generated by Kenyan livestock. This, the first study of its kind conducted anywhere in Africa, found African cattle are less responsible for some forms of global warming than previously believed.⁷ ILRI researchers at Kapiti are also testing new ways to feed and manage African livestock that can both increase livestock and farm yields and reduce livestock impacts on the environment.

Just who and what is the land grabbing putting at risk?

As to who, and what, is most at risk from the land grabbing at Kapiti, which has been escalating since November 2017, consider the following.

First are the people of Machakos County and elsewhere in Kenya who have been duped into thinking this land is available for purchase and stand to lose substantial amounts of money.

Second are the 80 ILRI workers who live with their families at Kapiti and the Kenyan and international scientists who conduct their experiments at Kapiti, many of whom have now been threatened with violence by the trespassers.

Third, these illegal incursions also threaten the wildlife-rich Athi-Kapiti Plains ecosystem, which is essential to the health of Nairobi National Park and other pre-eminent conservation areas in southern Kenya.

And fourth, the ongoing lawlessness risks disrupting or stopping important long-term livestock research, thereby threatening the futures of hundreds of millions of livestock producers—as well as the processors, sellers and consumers of milk and meat—across Kenya, Africa and Asia.

In brief, Kenyan people and livestock-wildlife ecosystems, as well as critical livestock research for the poor, are all now imperilled by the greedy actions of a few.

Footnotes
¹ ‘Livestock and a large number of wild herbivores dominate the Kitengela ecosystem, with wildebeest and zebra constituting over half the total wildlife population. Other wildlife species include: Maasai giraffe, Coke’s hartebeest, black rhino, African buffalo, Grant’s gazelle, Thomson’s gazelle, eland, impala and waterbuck and predators such as lions, cheetahs and leopards as well as a high diversity of bird life. The ecosystem forms an important part of the wet season dispersal area for wildlife that lives part of the year in Nairobi National Park.’
—From Valuing alternative land-use options in the Kitengela wildlife dispersal area of Kenya: A joint International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the African Conservation Centre (ACC) report undertaken for the Kitengela community, by Patti Kristjanson, Maren Radeny, David Nkedianye, Russ Kruska, Robin Reid, Helen Gichohi, Fred Atieno and Robert Sanford, ILRI Impact Assessment Series, ILRI, 2002.

² ‘Red Maasai sheep is a fat-tailed indigenous sheep breed in Kenya. It is renowned for its resistance to . . . gastrointestinal parasites and drought tolerance. It is, however, poorly ranked in terms of body weight. Until the mid-1970s, purebred Red Maasai sheep was the main type of sheep kept in the southern pastoral lands of Kenya, probably numbering several million head. In the 1970s, however, a population of the synthetic meat breed Dorper was imported to Kenya from South Africa for research and multiplication purposes, to increase weight gain. No instruction was provided to farmers about how to maintain a continuous crossbreeding programme and many farmers continued crossing their flocks with Dorpers. This indiscriminate crossbreeding was subsequently proven unsuitable in many production areas. Crossbreeding or upgrading to Dorper may be appropriate if the environmental conditions are good. In semi-arid regions, and when there is adequate feed, Dorper sheep has a larger body size and produces well compared with Red Maasai. However, in more harsh conditions, for example in arid or humid areas or under high parasite challenge, Red Maasai are of about the same size as Dorper and survive better . . . . Farmers . . . show interest in both breeds: Red Maasai for its drought and disease tolerance and Dorper for its body size and growth, so in order for a breeding programme to be accepted, it should consider using both breeds.
— From Purebreeding of Red Maasai and crossbreeding with Dorper sheep in different environments in Kenya, Journal of  Animal Breeding and Genetics, by E Zonabend König, E Strandberg, JMK Ojango, T Mirkena, AM Okeyo and J Philipsson, Dec 2017.

³ See Participatory mapping helps community save wildlife-rich pastoral lands, Geneflow Magazine, 2006, and Can the lion lie down with the lamb?, Msafiri Magazine, 2004.

⁴ Between 1977 and 2002, the wildlife populations in the plains to the south of Nairobi National Park fell by over 70%. Particularly hard hit were migratory animals such as wildebeest, which traditionally graze in the national park during the dry season and move south in search of new pasture during the wet season. From nearly 40,000 migrating animals in the 1970s, wildebeest numbers have fallen to about 1000 [in 2012]. . . . This is one of the few places in the world where you can see major wildlife populations, including 24 species of large mammals, grazing and hunting against the jagged backdrop of a populous city, often in the company of Maasai cattle. Little wonder, then, that there are conflicts between conservation and development, and sometimes between wildlife and the Maasai. . . . [T]he master plan provides the local council, for the first time, with the means to control development.—From Saving the plains: ILRI research team wins Sustainability Science Award for its pastoral research in Masailand, ILRI News blog, Jun 2012.

⁵ Read the award-winning science paper: ‘Evolution of models to support community and policy action with science: Balancing pastoral livelihoods and wildlife conservation in savannas of East Africa’, by R S Reid, D Nkedianye, M Y Said, D Kaelo, M Neselle, O Makui, L Onetu, S Kiruswa, N Ole Kamuaroa, P Kristjanson, J Ogutu, S B BurnSilver, M J Golman, R B Boone, K A Galvin, N M Dickson, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 Nov 2009.

⁶ For  more about ILRI’s Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) project and the Kenya Government’s Kenya Livestock Insurance Programme (KLIP), visit the IBLI website and  read: Record payouts being made by Kenya Government and insurers to protect herders facing historic drought, ILRI News blog, 21 Feb 2017.

⁷ Go here to read more about the impacts of climate change in Kenya and ILRI’s work to estimate greenhouse gas emission levels from African livestock.

Where can I get more information?

• ILRI brief about Kapiti Plains farmhouse and research centre: http://hdl.handle.net/10568/81323
• ILRI in Kenya brief: http://hdl.handle.net/10568
• ILRI website www.ilri.org and news blog news.ilri.org
• CGIAR website: www.cgiar.org
• ILRI projections of Kenya’s livestock trends: www.slideshare.net/ILRI/kenya-livprojections-timmar2015
• ILRI Corporate Report 2006: Safeguarding Livestock Diversity: The Time Is Now: http://hdl.handle.net/10568/2479
• ILRI Corporate Report 2015–2016: http://hdl.handle.net/10568/78805
• ILRI Strategy 2013–2022: Brochure http://hdl.handle.net/10568/29037

Who can I contact for further information?
For ILRI matters
Jimmy Smith, ILRI director general: j.smith [at] cgiar.org
Dieter Schillinger, ILRI assistant director general for biosciences: d.schillinger [at] cgiar.org
Romano Kiome, chief of party of a collaborative, ILRI-led agricultural development project in Kenya: r.kiome [at] cgiar.org

For technical or legal matters
Linda Opati, ILRI legal counsel: l.opati [at] cgiar.org
Ilona Gluecks, ILRI research facilities manager (on 3 weeks leave abroad starting 18 December 2017): i.gluecks [at] cgiar.org

For media enquiries
Susan MacMillan, ILRI communications, awareness, advocacy: s.macmillan [at] cgiar.org, cell: 0725 473 248

Kick-off event at Berlin’s tenth annual Global Forum for Food and Agriculture, Jan 2018 (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

This year’s GFFA in Berlin addressed
Shaping the Future of Livestock—Sustainably, Responsibly, Efficiently

The Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA), held annually in Berlin, had its tenth anniversary this year, from 18 to 20 Jan 2018. The forum is an international annual conference on the future of the global agri-food industry organized and hosted by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) in cooperation with GFFA Berlin e.V., the Senate of Berlin and Messe Berlin GmbH. Politicians, business people, scientists and members of civil society all take part in discussions of topics shaping agricultural policy.

This year the focus of the GFFA was livestock, specifically, how the future of livestock can be shaped to be more sustainable, responsible and efficient.

The forum’s ten expert panels this year covered a wide range of topics: 1 How livestock can help the world meet its Sustainable Development Goals; 2 Implementing animal welfare laws; 3 Africa’s livestock potential; 4 Alternatives in livestock feeding; 5 Solutions to challenges in the consumption of foods of animal origin; 6 Sustainable solutions for the livestock sector; 7 The climate, efficiency and welfare challenges of animal husbandry; 8 The contributions of Asian and Eastern European livestock farms and industries to global food security; 9 Antimicrobial resistance in Europe and beyond; and 10 More sustainable protein feed.

ILRI Director General Jimmy Smith served on a panel at the kick-off event for Berlin’s Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

A delegation from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) was involved in several of this year’s GFFA events, including the following.

(1) 18 Jan 2018: Kick-off event, with ILRI Director General Jimmy Smith serving on the panel.

(2) 18 Jan 2018: An expert panel organized by the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture and the Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock (GASL) on the topic of ‘Food of animal origin 2030: Solutions to consumption driven challenges’, with ILRI Assistant Director General Shirley Tarawali giving the keynote presentation.

(3) 19 Jan 2018: An expert panel, ‘Sustainable solutions for the livestock sector: The time is ripe!’, co-hosted by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development BMZ, the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ), ILRI, the Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock (GASL) and the Livestock Global Alliance (LGA).

(4) 19 Jan 2018: A High-Level Panel of the European Commission on ‘The future of livestock production’, with ILRI Director General Jimmy Smith serving as a member of the panel.

(5) 20 Jan 2018: The Berlin Agriculture Ministers’ Conference, the world’s largest meeting of agriculture ministers and the political highlight of the conference. ILRI Director General Jimmy Smith served as a technical expert at this ministerial conference, which produced a communiqué formulating the common position of 69 agriculture ministers on the future of livestock, the recommendations of which are now being incorporated in international discourse on livestock and agricultural policies.

In addition to Smith, the four other members of the panel that kicked off the GFFA on 18 Jan 2018 were Blairo Maggi, Brazilian Minister of Agriculture; Peter Bleser, parliamentary state secretary at the German Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) and master farmer; Julius Lwegaba, a representative of Welthungerhilfe (World Hunger Aid), a German non-governmental aid agency, Uganda; and Peter Giørtz-Carlsen, executive vice president and chief commercial officer Europe of Arla Foods.

ILRI’s Jimmy Smith made some of the following points in the panel discussion.

Although the solutions and trajectories for shifting to a more sustainable, responsible and efficient livestock future look very different, and will have very different starting points, depending on the local economy and environment, the kind of livestock raised and the system used to produce the animals, the overall aims of livestock stakeholders worldwide are similar if not the same—to produce food-producing animals in win-win-win ways that are sustainable, responsible and efficient. Below are some of the options that Smith mentioned suiting small-scale livestock keepers in low- and middle-income countries.

First, regarding global food and nutritional security, Smith said that some 50% of the meat, milk and cereals in the developing world are produced on smallholder farms that mix livestock raising with crop growing. This form of integrated crop-livestock farming, Smith said, presents significant opportunities to improve farm productivity in sustainable ways. For example, because the stalks and leaves of crops after their grain has been harvested are a major source of animal feed on these mixed farms, improving the quality and quantity of these crop residues can improve livestock productivity significantly without over-using natural resources.

To be responsible, he said, we should remember to take account of the essential and multiple roles that farm animals play in smallholder livelihoods and ensure that messages about the roles of animal production in food security are balanced. Studies in Zambia, for example, have shown that poor households that received a dairy cow increased both their own consumption of dairy products and their income from selling those products, the latter of which the households used to buy more nutritious diets.

And improving animal productivity in smallholder systems through development and use of better breeds, feeds and health will improve livestock efficiency by generating more livestock product per unit of input (labour, land, capital).

Other examples

Sustainable: More than three quarters of a  billion people depend directly on livestock for their livelihoods. In developing countries, animal agriculture provides nutritious food and the income to buy more nutritious food as well crop inputs, traction for ploughing, and manure for fertilizing the crop soils. Particularly for the most vulnerable livestock keepers, pastoralists in dryland areas, livestock losses due to droughts will send families into desperate poverty. Providing novel forms of livestock insurance can protect herders against such losses and support their livestock livelihoods.

Responsible: While overuse and poor use of antimicrobial drugs threaten human health, these drugs in developing countries remain essential for treating infectious livestock diseases that cause devastating animal losses. What’s needed is to make animal health products and information more available, to improve animal husbandry systems and feeding, and to provide greater access to vaccination and veterinary services. With this integrated approach, use of antimicrobial drugs in smallholder livestock production can be rationalized and reduced.

Efficient: Improving animal productivity in smallholder systems through better breeds, feeds and healthcare has great potential to mitigate the amount of greenhouse gases emitted  per unit of meat or milk produced. And developing better livestock vaccines is by far the most efficient and cost-effective way to reduce animal diseases and losses (the total benefits of having eradicated rinderpest, through vaccination, from Kenya alone is estimated to be nearly half a billion US dollars).

View ILRI images of the GFFA here and GFFA images here.

Watch a 3-minute animated video produced by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture to kick off the GFFA.

Read news clippings about the GFFA

Livestock are taking the limelight in global policymaking fora
ILRI News blog, 21 Feb 2018
Recognition of the importance of livestock in addressing some of the world’s greatest challenges, including meeting the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, has been rising sharply in recent years among leading national, political, donor and international bodies. ILRI works with many of these organizations to help ensure that the world’s many diverse livestock systems evolve in ways that are efficient, profitable, sustainable and equitable.

Animal health and welfare, two cornerstones of sustainable, responsible and effective food production
ILRI News blog, 9 Feb 2018
Monique Eliot, director general of the OIE, leads a high-level panel discussion at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture, in Berlin, 19 Jan 2018. Improved animal health and welfare standards do more than improve animal health and welfare, as important as those are. Applying such standards can increase food production in ways that also protect the environment and enhance the resilience of livestock producers and systems.

Animal Protein Virtually Irreplaceable Part of ‘Children, Young & Elderly Diet’: DG, FAO
Business World (India) 25 Jan 2018
The world population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100, according to a report. As a result of this growing population, consumer behaviour will also change. Now, more and more people live in cities, which unfolds more challenges in farming for middle-class people.

GFFA discusses the future of animal husbandry
The Pig Site, 24 Jan 2018
A delegation from the Ministry of Agribusiness, led by Luis Miguel Etchevehere, actively participated in the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA). On this occasion, the German Presidency proposed as a topic of discussion, “Shaping the future of livestock in a responsible and efficient sustainable way”.

Agricultural Ministers Call for Action on Sustainable Livestock Production for SDG Implementation
International Institute for Sustainable Development, 23 Jan 2018
20 January 2018: Agricultural Ministers and representatives of international organizations participating in the tenth Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA) stressed the need for action towards more sustainable, responsible and efficient livestock production and animal husbandry to address global challenges, including SDG 2 (Zero Hunger); SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being); and SDG 13 (Climate Action).

Agrarminister der Welt beschließen Umbau der Tierhaltung bis 2030
Top Agrar magazine (Germany), 22 Jan 2018
Über Lösungen, wie die Tierhaltung produktiver, gleichzeitig aber umweltschonender und mit mehr Tierwohl werden kann, diskutierten vergangene Woche über 2.000 Vertreter aus Politik und Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Zivilgesellschaft in zehn Fachpodien, zwei Ministertreffen und einem Wirtschaftspodium auf dem 10. Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA) in Berlin. In der Auftaktveranstaltung erinnerte der Generaldirektor des International…

Grüne Woche 2018: Abschluss 10. Global Forum for Food and Agriculture: Mit nachhaltiger Tierhaltung die Welternährung sichern (FOTO)
Finanzen (Germany), 21 Jan 2018
Querverweis: Bildmaterial ist abrufbar unter http://www.presseportal.de/bilder—Im Jahr 2050 werden auf der Erde zehn Milliarden Menschen leben. Mit dem Wachstum verändern sich auch die Konsumgewohnheiten. Immer mehr Menschen leben in Städten und eine wachsende Mittelschicht sorgt dafür, dass die Nachfrage nach Fleisch, Milch und Eiern rasant steigt. Wie kann es gelingen, die Tierhaltung…

Food is Political! 33,000 tell the world they are fed up with agri-industry
ARC2020 (Europe), 20 Jan 2018
33,000 citizens—including 160 tractor driving farmers—made their way through the winter streets of Berlin on Saturday to tell the world—food is political!

Sustainable livestock futures—BMZ, GIZ and ILRI at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture this week
ILRI News blog, 15 Jan 2018
For several days this week (18–20 Jan 2018), several scientific directors and staff of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)—Jimmy Smith, Shirley Tarawali, Dieter Schillinger, Lutz Merbold and Kristina Roesel—will be participating with several ILRI partners in the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA), held in Berlin, Germany.