Livestock insurance research impacts on policy

Nathan Jensen outlines how studies into Index Based Livestock Insurance have impacted governmental actions.

Improving policy is one of the primary goals of development research.

While direct, large impacts on policy are possible they are also rare; most of us in the field hope to, at best, provide evidence that nudges policy to be more effective and better at meeting its goals.

A newly published policy comment in the journal of Food Policy, part of a series celebrating 50 years of publications in the journal, highlights how research on Index Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) has led to impact on policy.

IBLI was developed as an option for pastoralists whose livestock are threatened by drought and launched in East Africa in 2010. Basing the insurance policies on an index, rather than documented losses, allows for factors such as the large geographic range of livestock, difficulty in evidencing ownership of animals, and challenges in establishing the cause of lost livestock, that make conventional insurance impractical. IBLI is based on an index of relative vegetation scarcity in a region, as an indication of drought risk, and has been shown to be effective in practice.

The research reviewed policy documents from national governments of East Africa, development investors, and donors (e.g., Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, US Agency for International Development); and strategic documents by humanitarian and non-government organisations operating in the region.

Findings

Research for the policy comment shows that papers published in Food Policy, as well as other publications on IBLI, are cited in national and regional strategic plans and are evident in strategic documents describing the priorities of donors operating in the region.

The evidence generated through research helped to motivate large public and private investments in expanding IBLI coverage.

For example, between 2017 and 2021, the Government of Kenya provided IBLI coverage to 18,000 vulnerable pastoral households each year, insuring more than US$63 million as part of its social protection programming.

More recently, over 200,000 pastoral households across Kenya and Ethiopia purchased subsidised IBLI coverage through the regional De-Risking Pastoral Economies in the Horn of Africa (DRIVE) programme, and IBLI pilots have been launched in several additional countries across Africa.

While most policy documents do not provide explicit citations to support claims, IBLI’s impacts, which were assessed and measured through research, are referenced broadly in policy documents. For example, they are referred to in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, Africa’s Intergovernmental Group on Development (IGAD) Strategy for Sustainable and Resilient Livestock Development in View of Climate Change (2022–2037), and the and the UN Development Programme report Achieving dryland women’s empowerment: environmental resilience and social transformation imperatives.

This recent article provided an opportunity to look back over a body of work and assess its impacts.

We cannot know exactly what caused the large public investments and support for IBLI, but there is strong circumstantial evidence that the research on IBLI played a role. The result of that public support has been a massive scaling of IBLI to hundreds of thousands of pastoralists across several countries in Africa.

Findings

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