Overview

The Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) Ethiopia pilot project builds on lessons learned from a highly innovative pilot venture underway in northern Kenya, adapting that pilot to the Ethiopian context. It will design and introduce new group-based and/or credit-linked IBLI products. It will explicitly incorporate Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions of climate change and associated rangeland biomass dynamics in order to explore dynamic pricing and the potential for conditional insurance transfer programs linking livestock insurance with individual behaviors to adapt to climate change. This project will implement a rigorous impact evaluation framework based on a quasi-experimental designed overlaid with a government-run safety net program (the Productive Safety Net Program, PSNP) to identify potential complementarities or tradeoffs between these different instruments for addressing poverty and shocks. Our team will explores prospective risk layering options with macro-scale famine insurance for Ethiopia. Because of the similarity of the IBLI product and the agroecological system with the existing Kenya pilot, this project will permit comparative assessment of IBLI performance in different institutional and economic contexts, laying the foundation for disseminating IBLI to west Africa, southern Africa, south Asia and other regions with significant poverty and livestock populations.