The study, published in the journal Pastoralism, was conducted by Gufu Oba of the Gaadisa Gummi Foundation, Hussein Tadicha Wario of the Center for Research and Development in Drylands, and Hassan Guyo Roba of The Christensen Fund. It forms part of a rare longitudinal research programme: 164 households were randomly selected in 1983 across eight locations in the Obbu region and interviewed repeatedly over three decades about their drought experiences. For the current analysis, the team added 74 newly selected households from the settlements of Ambalo and Walda, ultimately surveying 234 households, running three focus group discussions of 12 to 20 participants each, and conducting 20 key informant interviews with local experts and leaders. Interviews were carried out in the Oromo dialect with the help of local primary school teachers, and when original household heads had died, researchers spoke with their children or surviving spouses. Because the data varied widely and contained gaps, the authors deliberately used non-parametric, frequency-based analysis that integrates quantitative indicators such as mortality rates and market prices with qualitative narratives.

The region itself is a study in ecological gradients. The Obbu Borana, the main residents of Sololo sub-county in Marsabit County, live across ten locations that the study divides into semi-arid, arid, and very arid zones, each supporting different combinations of farming, range enclosures, and mobile livestock keeping. In normal years, rainfall of 250 to 400 millimetres falls in two seasons—short rains between October and December and long rains between March and May. Drought sets in when one or both of these seasons fail, exhausting surface water in dams and pools and the pasture left from the previous year. By the third and fourth consecutive dry years, the situation becomes catastrophic, and families depend almost entirely on diesel-engine and solar-powered boreholes for water. The researchers asked three interlinked questions: how environmental vulnerability shaped species-specific coping, how labour arrangements and herd mobility influenced drought management, and how land-use change, fodder practices, and market fluctuations affected both coping and adaptation.

The answer to the first question was stark. Cattle suffered mortality rates of 80 to 90 percent during the drought and, with annual recovery of only around 2.3 percent, offered households little hope of a rapid rebound. Sheep and goats lost 73.6 percent of their numbers but regenerated at roughly 13.7 percent per year, making small stock critical assets for food security and liquidity. Camels were the clear winners, with mortality of just 45 percent, thanks to their tolerance of thirst and their ability to browse on diverse forage. The consequences of this species-specific vulnerability are already visible in the herd composition of the region: the number of households owning camels has increased by 40 percent over the last decade, echoing earlier research showing that a 30-year shift from cattle to camels among Kenyan pastoralists represents a multifaceted adaptation to climate variability. The study argues that the long-term solution to drought vulnerability lies in managing multiple species together, combining grazers and browsers whose differing adaptive capacities spread risk across the herd.

Community narratives painted a picture of ecological collapse that made these losses almost inevitable. Sixty-six percent of surveyed households reported complete loss of vegetation cover and increased bare ground, 27 percent described rampant overgrazing, and smaller proportions reported loss of grass cover, tree die-back, and the drying of water pans. One informant told the researchers that even grass litter could not be seen on the ground. As surface pools and dams dried up, livestock were forced to trek ever-longer distances to boreholes, burning energy they could not replace through grazing. Cattle, which need watering every one to two days, were hit hardest; sheep and goats could endure intervals of three to four days, while camels went seven to ten days without water. Some households reported walking up to 60 kilometres to reach water, and most walked 10 to 20 kilometres daily—a burden borne largely by women. The Borana manage these distances through a specialised watering system called buulto, in which herders camp midway between pasture and water and shuttle animals back and forth, but even this sophisticated strategy could not prevent mass deaths when the entire landscape dried simultaneously.

Herd mobility, the traditional first line of defence, also met its limits. Herders traditionally move stock seasonally between dry- and wet-season grazing zones and across the border into Ethiopia, and modern tools—trucks, motorbikes, and mobile phones—have improved communication about where pasture and water remain. But during a regional drought, there is nowhere for herds to go. Families with large herds attempted long-distance migration, negotiating access and scouting resources across multiple relocations, while owners of smaller herds favoured local management, fencing enclosures and feeding animals at home. Twenty-nine percent of households migrated to find pasture, and 66 percent used mobility to search for grazing, yet focus groups reported that these movements often failed to preserve stock given the scale of the regional crisis. The timing of movement proved critical: herds moved early in the drought, while animals were still in fair condition, fared better than those moved after body condition had deteriorated.

Compounding these ecological pressures was a quiet revolution in herding labour. In the traditional Borana system, family labour formed the backbone of herd management, and hired herders were paid in heifers. Today, family labour is in decline as younger generations pursue schooling and alternative employment, and herding has become monetised: 42 percent of households relied on hired labour, typically paid less than 40 US dollars per month, often recruited from across the Ethiopian border because local labour was scarce. Low wages, insufficient rations during droughts when milk production collapsed, harsh living conditions, and owners’ inexperience in managing workers led to high turnover, with hired herders frequently quitting midway through the drought. Cooperative labour arrangements offered partial relief but diluted individual attention to animals. The authors suggest that if wages and working conditions improved, waged herding could become a genuine employment sector rather than a crisis-driven stopgap.

Market dynamics turned ecological disaster into economic ruin. With 92 percent of families reporting that low livestock prices crushed their purchasing power, distressed sales of weakened cattle and sheep at what respondents called throwaway prices created destitution affecting more than 80 percent of households in some locations. Meanwhile, the costs of survival mounted: 94 percent of households listed animal feed as their main expense, 58 percent veterinary drugs, and 36 percent water trucking. Some families paid as much as 200,000 Kenyan shillings for a lorry load of hay bales hauled from Meru County or across the Ethiopian border. One informant in Mukutano described bringing the last of his animals into his compound, watching them die in groups of five or eight a day, buying hay delivered by lorry, and finally feeding the survivors boiled maize and beans—an improvised measure that saved a few cows. Land-use changes, including the more than 600 square kilometres of farms and semi-private range enclosures that now fragment the region, failed to buffer the drought: bush encroachment, poor maintenance, exclusionary land tenure, high input costs, trespassing neighbours, and a lack of storage infrastructure meant enclosures produced little surplus forage when it was needed most.

Amid these failures, one innovation stands out. Women, who make up 96.67 percent of participants in fodder banking, organised into registered groups to harvest, bale, and store grass on community-allocated land. The chairlady of the Maliti Women’s Group in Mado Adhi recounted how 60 members cleared allocated land, harvested more than 60 backloads of grass over two seasons, sold them for 60,000 shillings, and, after training in baling, built a store of 2,000 bales valued at 800,000 shillings. This represents a new pathway to asset creation that incorporates conservation elements largely absent from the traditional system, and the authors argue that such registered groups could access external support to fill gaps in local fodder markets. Fodder banking anchors households to local reserves, reducing the need for desperate long-distance trekking—though the study cautions that these sedentary strategies must be balanced against the ecological necessity of mobility.

Ultimately, the study’s deepest insight is temporal: the decisions households made during 2019–2022 were not improvised in isolation but informed by cumulative lessons from four decades of droughts. Families entered this drought already favouring camels and goats over vulnerable cattle, already weighing the risks of hired labour, and already sceptical of enclosures that had failed before. The researchers conclude that resilience in drought-prone pastoral systems depends on integrating ecological knowledge, gendered initiatives, and adaptive diversification—and that pastoralists themselves are leading the way, actively reorganising labour, diversifying herds, and innovating through collective action to sustain their livelihoods as the climate crisis intensifies.

Subject of Research: Pastoralist household coping and adaptive strategies during northern Kenya's 2019–2022 drought

Article Title: Insights into pastoralist households’ coping and adaptive strategies during northern Kenya’s 2019–2022 drought

Article References: Insights into pastoralist households’ coping and adaptive strategies during northern Kenya’s 2019–2022 drought. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.16489

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/past.2026.16489

Keywords: pastoralism, drought, northern Kenya, livestock mortality, camels, herd diversification, fodder banking, herding labour, herd mobility, rangeland degradation, livelihood resilience, Borana

IBLI was introduced in Kenya in 2010 through a partnership between the Government of Kenya, the World Bank, and research institutions including the International Livestock Research Institute. Its central innovation was to abandon the costly, labor-intensive model of traditional indemnity insurance, in which assessors must verify every claim on the ground. Instead, the program relies on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, or NDVI, a measure of green vegetation computed from satellite imagery. When NDVI values across a defined insurance unit drop below a preset threshold, payouts are triggered automatically. The design eliminates moral hazard and adverse selection, slashes administrative costs, and offers a transparency that conventional livestock insurance in remote regions has rarely achieved. For pastoralists whose herds constitute both their income and their savings, the promise was transformative.

Yet the scheme carries an inherent vulnerability. Because payouts depend on a satellite-derived index rather than on actual losses experienced by individual households, a gap can open between what herders suffer and what insurers pay. Economists distinguish two forms of this basis risk. Upside basis risk occurs when payouts arrive despite no real loss, a windfall that can only improve welfare. Downside basis risk is the opposite and far more damaging case: a family watches animals die in a drought, yet the index signals that forage remained sufficient, and no indemnity arrives. It is this second form that the new study places at the center of its analysis, arguing that repeated experience of unpaid losses may reshape household behavior in ways that erode the program’s welfare benefits.

To quantify the problem, the researchers assembled data from the IBLI program covering 2019 through 2021 across Garissa, Isiolo, Mandera, Marsabit, Samburu, Tana River, Turkana, and Wajir counties. Forage availability was proxied using MODIS satellite NDVI imagery at a resolution of 250 meters, aggregated into ten-day composites and then averaged to the county level, which corresponds to the insurance unit. Rainfall came from the Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data, a gridded dataset at roughly five-kilometer resolution that is widely used for drought monitoring. After quality control, standardization into anomalies relative to historical means, and alignment across 5,706 observations, the team employed a two-stage empirical strategy to measure how closely the vegetation index tracks the rainfall that drives forage growth.

The first stage used quantile regression, a technique chosen for its robustness to outliers and its ability to capture relationships at different points of the conditional distribution. Rather than modeling average vegetation conditions, the researchers focused on the fifth percentile of standardized NDVI, because IBLI is designed to protect herders against the catastrophic tail of forage scarcity, not against ordinary variation. In 2019, the relationship between precipitation and forage was strong and statistically significant: an additional unit of current-season rainfall was associated with a 0.049-unit increase in standardized NDVI, with lagged rainfall from two years earlier contributing a further 0.057 units, both showing diminishing returns at higher rainfall levels. By 2021, however, neither current nor lagged precipitation showed a statistically significant relationship with vegetation, a temporal instability that itself carries implications for how reliably any rainfall- or vegetation-based index can predict localized drought losses.

The second stage applied a modified variance-of-error approach, treating the unexplained residual divergence between NDVI and precipitation as an indirect measure of basis risk. The results were striking in their consistency. Every county, in every year of the study period, exhibited positive values of the basis-risk parameter, indicating downside basis risk throughout the region. Garissa recorded the largest average mismatch at 0.2508 over the full period, followed by Isiolo at 0.1755 and Wajir at 0.1105, while Mandera showed the smallest at 0.0381. The distributions of both NDVI and precipitation were positively skewed, meaning adverse events occurred more frequently than the favorable anomalies that would generate payouts without losses. In plain terms, herders across northern Kenya repeatedly bore losses that the insurance index failed to capture.

To translate these measurements into welfare terms, the authors built a theoretical framework grounded in expected utility theory, modeling a risk-averse pastoralist whose wealth evolves across four mutually exclusive states of nature: loss with a matching signal, loss without a signal, no loss with a signal, and no loss without a signal. Because basis risk is unobservable to insurers, it cannot be written into contracts, but herders learn about it through experience. The framework predicts an important asymmetry. Households that receive payouts without losses, the upside case, may increase spending on welfare-enhancing goods such as food, education, healthcare, and leisure. Households that suffer losses without compensation, the downside case, are predicted to cut back on precisely those expenditures as a coping mechanism, deplete savings, and forgo interest income, with the anticipation of future downside risk potentially discouraging deposits in financial institutions altogether.

An illustrative calculation for Wajir County, using a representative herder with an initial endowment of 15 Tropical Livestock Units, the minimum herd size generally considered necessary to sustain a pastoral livelihood, demonstrates the mechanism. In each year from 2019 to 2021, the insured loss implied by the index fell short of the actual loss, satisfying the theoretical condition for a welfare loss. The authors are careful to frame this as an application of the theoretical model rather than a causal county-level estimate, and they acknowledge a central limitation: the study lacks household-level data on livestock mortality, indemnity payments, and consumption at the spatial and temporal resolution needed to validate the proxy directly. The NDVI-precipitation divergence may also reflect ecological heterogeneity, grazing management, and measurement error rather than insurance shortfalls alone.

Even with those caveats, the findings challenge a body of earlier research that reported welfare gains from IBLI, including evidence from Mongolia showing that payouts facilitated rapid herd recovery and Kenyan studies identifying income stabilization and shifts toward higher-return herding strategies. The new analysis suggests that persistent downside basis risk may offset those benefits, imposing psychological and economic burdens that can outweigh the nominal value of coverage even when premiums are heavily subsidized. The study also connects to a growing experimental literature showing that farmers are acutely sensitive to basis risk, that demand for index insurance falls as basis risk rises, and that ambiguity aversion can delay or reduce adoption, particularly among households unfamiliar with the technology.

The policy implications are concrete. The authors argue that subsidy structures should be revisited so that participation reflects deliberate choices rather than blanket incentives, that index precision must improve, and that behavioral considerations deserve a place in program design. Notably, they cite evidence that rainfall-based indices with higher spatial resolution exhibit lower basis risk than NDVI-based systems, suggesting a possible path forward. They also point to the institutional context: communal grazing regimes can blunt individual-level incentives, and strengthening land tenure and grazing rights could improve both targeting and uptake. As climate variability intensifies across the Horn of Africa, the study’s central message is sobering but constructive. Index insurance can still deliver on its promise, but only if the gap between what satellites see and what herders live through is narrowed, and only if insurers recognize that households are not passive policyholders but adaptive learners who update their trust with every unpaid loss.

Subject of Research: Basis risk and welfare effects of satellite-based index livestock insurance for pastoralists in northern Kenya

Article Title: Welfare effects of behavioral responses to basis risk in remote-sensing livestock insurance in northern Kenya

Article References: Maina, S., Miller, M., Torell, G. L., Hanan, N. P., Anchang, J., & Kahiu, N. (2026). Welfare effects of behavioral responses to basis risk in remote-sensing livestock insurance in northern Kenya. Frontiers in Environmental Economics, 5, Article 1750935. https://doi.org/10.3389/frevc.2026.1750935

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frevc.2026.1750935

Keywords: index-based livestock insurance, basis risk, NDVI, pastoralism, northern Kenya, drought, remote sensing, welfare economics, consumption smoothing, climate variability, behavioral economics, rangelands