Designing Index-Based Livestock Insurance for Managing Asset Risk in Northern Kenya

This article describes a novel index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) product piloted among pastoralists in Northern Kenya, where insurance markets are effectively absent and uninsured risk exposure is a main cause of poverty. We describe the methodology used to design the contract and its underlying index of predicted area-average livestock mortality, established statistically using longitudinal observations of household-level herd mortality fit to remotely sensed vegetation data. Household-level performance analysis based on simulations finds that IBLI removes 25-40 percent of total livestock mortality risk. We describe the contract pricing and the risk exposures of the underwriter to establish IBLI's reinsurability on international markets.