In the wake of the earthquake, Heifer Nepal deployed a 3-fold response: immediate relief, livestock-related relief, and implementation of a revolving fund that established interest free loans to affected Heifer beneficiaries.

Researchers supported by the Feed the Future Assets & Market Access Innovation Lab launched an Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) pilot in the Marsabit District of northern Kenya.

By adapting traditional financial products delivered by microfinance institutions, and making them more flexible to meet the needs of farmers and rural inhabitants, many of these challenges faced by index insurance can be overcome.

Post-game conversation saw fisherman make big connections to the real world, noting things like the impact of illegal gear in damaging their resources.

An exciting project in Uganda is bringing together a team of ICT entrepreneurs, economists, computer scientists, and agri-business professionals to test whether a highly scalable, high-tech approach can reduce transactions costs and improve market access for smallholders.

During these Geneva meetings, the draft outputs of tools and guidelines for index insurance were presented to the broader GAN membership for feedback and application.

BASIS researchers, in partnership with leading geo-spatial software engineering firm (SI Organization), developed a potential solution to these problems by using satellite information at high resolution, coupled with better modeling approaches, to reduce basis risk and improve index insurance performance.

Index insurance shows considerable promise, especially in settings like the arid and semi-arid lands of east Africa where conventional insurance to cover potentially catastrophic herd losses does not exist.

Index-based livestock insurance (IBLI), aims to protect against the covariate risk of catastrophic livestock loss due to drought. Understanding what determines access to IBLI by gender can shape strategies to equitably provide access to this and other innovative risk management products.

Based on lessons learned in the first few years of its program, Oxfam America recently formulated an ambitious coordinated SRI intervention that targets entire irrigation blocs, a network of shared canals and drains, with incentives for full SRI adoption.