The role of mobile technologies in promoting sustainable delivery of livestock insurance in the East African Drylands: Towards sustainable Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) for pastoralists

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) together with its partners launched a pilot index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) product in January 2010 in the Marsabit District of northern Kenya. It has since been scaled across the drylands of Kenya, and is also gaining momentum in Ethiopia where a pilot insurance project was launched in 2012. One problem inspired ILRI’s IBLI agenda: finding a sustainable way to help pastoralists to recover quickly from the considerable losses they incur during severe droughts. Over the years, evidence of IBLI impact and value for money, and continued research and development on product design, as well as innovations along the service delivery chain, have helped with uptake, in convincing governments and development partners of its importance as a risk management tool, and have won IBLI a plethora of international awards.Briefly describing the key elements of the IBLI agenda, this presentation focuses on how the IBLI team leveraged a suite of digital technologies – largely mobile based – to help surmount some of the main obstacles to the provision of IBLI. Even in the sparsely populated drylands of northern Kenya, which the IBLI product targets, socioeconomic evolution has resulted in a growing density of mobile network coverage and a proliferation of mobile phone ownership, and use. Exploiting this trend, the IBLI team and partners have developed mobile applications for offline sales transactions and drastically reduced the cost and time to delivery of indemnity payments, as well as a whole host of other applications in information exchange and knowledge dissemination.