Description

Abstract: Uninsured risk challenges the more than 3 million pastoralist households who live in northern Kenya’s arid and semi arid lands. Whenever drought hits this region, as it did in 2011, households dependent on livestock must cope with large livestock losses (families lost about a third of their animals in the recent drought). When households anticipate droughts such as this, they may tend to shy away from higher return activities in order to pursue safer strategies, keeping themselves poorer on average than they need to be. During and after a drought, cash-strapped households sell off remaining livestock, driving down prices, making it that much harder to cope with the disaster, and again reinforcing the poverty impacts of uninsured risk.