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Examining the successes, failures, possibilities and limitations of efforts across rural Kenya, this book analyses the socioeconomic and institutional prerequisites for decentralization, and the role of community groups and producer organizations in reducing poverty and promoting empowerment

Index Based Livestock Insurance in the Arid and Semi-Arid Land (ASALs) of Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia is being implemented by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), as a drought coping mechanism, anchored on the belief that development of an insurance scheme for livestock in a pastoral setting could be an effective risk-management strategy. The contracts are designed using low cost, accessible and reliable satellite data; Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index (NDVI). The payouts ensure that the animals are kept alive instead of providing payouts to replace / restock potentially dead animals. One of ILRI's commercial partners, Takaful Insurance of Africa (TIA) uses community shop agents in the distribution of the IBLI product. This approach is based on an agency model for providing financial services such as micro- insurance. Accurate, reliable and timely information, enable pastoralists to make better decisions on the kinds of feeds, animal health and marketing decisions; particularly where to sell and buy animals and negotiate better prices. Though ICT in developing countries have become a major means of disseminating information, both pastoralists and organisations working in the ASALs of Kenya have not yet fully taken advantage of the available cutting edge scientific techniques. This study therefore sought to understand how mobile technology through an agency model can be leveraged for crowd-sourcing and dissemination of information important for marketing livestock, livestock products and services. Key informant interviews and focused group discussions were carried out with the different actors from the private sector, public sector and the pastoralists. Isiolo County was chosen as the study site. Some of the key findings suggest that most efforts to use ICTs in collection and dissemination of information have failed in contexts that have no other support mechanisms around the pastoralist. Secondly, an agent in the form of drought monitors, food monitors, Community Animal Health Workers and Government administrators', are vital support to phone based approaches in collection and dissemination of information. Further investigations are needed to understand how these entities can be used to implement an effective ICT based market information system, leading to sustainable and food secure livelihoods in the ASALs.

Department for International Development, United Kingdom ; European Union ; United States Agency for International Development ; World Bank ; Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia ; Peer Review

Andrew G. Mude is an ILRI author ; There is a strong link between weather and the welfare of poor populations. Low-frequency, short-term, but catastrophic weather shocks can trigger destructive coping responses to disaster—for example, withdrawal of children from school, distress sale of assets, refugee migration, crime, and severe human suffering. Moreover, these adverse impacts often persist as children's physical growth falters, and household productivity, asset accumulation, and income growth are dampened (Dercon and Krishnan 2000; Hoddinott and Kinsey 2001; Hoddinott 2006). The prospect of such shocks may also induce underinvestment in assets at risk, limiting poor households' ability to grow their way out of poverty over time (Carter and Barrett 2006). The problem originates with the difficulty poor households face in insuring covariate risk. While informal social insurance arrangements and flexible credit contracts often provide the poor with significant insurance against household-specific, idiosyncratic risk, when entire communities or social networks confront the same biophysical shock, their capacity to buffer members' welfare may be insufficient to prevent severe and widespread human suffering. The magnitude and intensity of such suffering sometimes merits the label "famine" (Howe and Devereux 2004). External (domestic and international) relief organizations and governments commonly step in to provide emergency assistance in the wake of catastrophic covariate shocks such as drought, especially when the specter of famine looms. Operational agencies and the donor community are thereby financially exposed to catastrophic weather risks in developing countries via their humanitarian commitment to emergency response. In addition to their potential for other purposes (Barnett, Barrett and Skees forthcoming; Alderman and Haque 2007), recent innovations in index insurance show promise as a means to facilitate improved emergency response to weather-related catastrophic shocks that threaten famine. Just as improved early warning systems and emergency needs assessment practices have used timely monitoring and analysis of vulnerable areas to significantly improve humanitarian response in recent decades (Barrett and Maxwell 2005), so too can weather index insurance facilitate further improvement by addressing several key remaining weaknesses in global famine prevention efforts. This paper briefly outlines how donors and operational agencies might use weather index insurance for famine prevention, enumerates key prospective benefits from such products, and then illustrates the possibilities with an application to the arid lands of northern Kenya, an area of recurring severe droughts that elicit massive international humanitarian responses.

We present a simple two‐period, dual‐economy model in which migration options may affect the informal financing of educational investments. When credit contracts are universally available and perfectly enforceable, spatially varied returns to human capital have no effect on educational investment patterns. But when financial markets are incomplete and informal mechanisms with imperfect contract enforcement must fill the breach, attributes that affect the returns to education will affect educational lending and, consequently, educational attainment. Migration options can increase the returns to education, but can also choke off the informal finance on which poorer rural households may depend for long‐term, lumpy investments like children's education.

Years of concerted activism to bring awareness of climate change and its consequences to the fore of global concerns are finally yielding dividends. Until recently, most climate change activity focused on medium- to long-term projections regarding the nature and trajectory of change processes. With the uncertainties inherent in long-term climate projections and the difficulty of building political and economic momentum from hypothetical future scenarios, progress was slow. The recent past has, however, resulted in a drastic increase in extreme climate events across the globe that has wreaked untold humanitarian and economic havoc. The costly present day manifestations of climate change have catapulted climate concerns to the forefront of the global arena. The recent high-level event convened by the Secretary General of the United Nations to address the leadership challenge of climate change and build momentum for climate change talks (Bali, Indonesia, December 2007) is a clear indication that the urgency of climate change has fostered the degree of serious commitment it requires from the global agenda. Whatever its impacts, it is widely acknowledged that poor communities, already vulnerable to a suite of existing risks and endowed with meagre resources, will be the most adversely affected as climate change is superimposed on their already tenuous situation. In recognition of the need to help vulnerable populations in developing countries adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), in conjunction with its partners, funds programmes aimed at reducing the vulnerability of countries to the impacts of climate change and helps them build adaptive capacity. The Kenya Adaptation to Climate Change in the Arid Lands (KACCAL) project is one such initiative supported in conjunction with the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). About 80% of Kenya is arid or semi-arid and the main livelihood activities in these areas are pastoral, agropastoral and subsistence agriculture. Currently, these populations are among the poorest in Kenya, suffer from a weak natural resource base, are negatively affected by socio-economic and demographic trends that see a growing population depending on diminishing rangelands, and are relatively marginalized from the growing economy. Add to this the impacts of climate change, of which the recent severe and extended droughts of 2001, 2004–06 and the widespread flooding in 2007 are an early signal, and the livelihood threats to the communities of Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) are clear and present.

This open access book is the result of an expert panel convened by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Nature Sustainability. The panel tackled the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 head-on, with respect to the global systems that produce and distribute food. The panel's rigorous synthesis and analysis of existing research leads compellingly to multiple actionable recommendations that, if adopted, would simultaneously lead to healthy and nutritious diets, equitable and inclusive value chains, resilience to shocks and stressors, and climate and environmental sustainability.

Technological and institutional innovations in agri-food systems (AFSs) over the past century have brought dramatic advances in human well-being worldwide. Yet these gains increasingly appear unsustainable due to massive, adverse spillover effects on climate, natural environment, public health and nutrition, and social justice. How can humanity innovate further to bring about AFS transformations that can sustain and expand past progress, while making them healthier for all people and for the planet that must sustain current and future generations? This report was commissioned by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability in response to an invitation from the journal Nature Sustainability, which—in collaboration with its new sister journal, Nature Food—wanted to devote its 2020 expert panel to this topic. The panel brought together experts who come from many different continents and who span a wide range of disciplines and organizations—from industry and universities to social movements, governments, philanthropies, institutional and venture capital investors, and multilateral agencies. The panel synthesized the best current science to describe the present state of the world's AFSs and key external drivers of AFS changes over the next 25–50 years, as well as tease out key lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic experience this year. As is increasingly widely recognized, the costs that farmers and downstream value chain actors incur and the prices consumers pay understate foods' true costs to society once one accounts for adverse environmental, health, and social spillover effects. Inevitable demographic, economic, and climate change in the coming decades will catastrophically aggravate these problems under business-as-usual scenarios. Innovations will be needed to facilitate concerted, coordinated efforts to transition to more healthy, equitable, resilient, and sustainable AFSs.