The insurance works. It is associated with fewer distress sales of livestock, more milk production and household income from milk, better child nutrition and less stress. Compared with Kenya’s standard anti-poverty program, which is based on cash transfers, insurance is much more cost effective to scale up.

Insurance may also help even pastoralists who are not insured. When forage dries up, a whole region is hit at once. So insurance providers inject needed cash from outside reinsurers, and the resulting economic activity can lift everyone.

Commercial insurers sell the livestock insurance. But the government is trying to spread this approach by beginning to shoulder some of the cost of premiums. Kenya expects to cover 80,000 households by 2019 in the Kenya Livestock Insurance Program. But that’s a tiny percentage of households that need it, and the program will cover only five cows per household.

Mude said that numerous governments in Africa and parts of Asia have contacted him, eager to try the idea. So it’s worth looking at how Mude and his collaborators overcame some of the toughest problems — and what still needs to be solved.

•Insurance is an unfamiliar and untrusted idea to herders.



Herders get risk mitigation. “Even though some cannot write, they remember livestock dynamics for the past 10 or 20 years,” said Mude. “They’re very clear about their key risk and receptive to an idea or service that could help them minimize risk.”



What’s harder is helping them understand that they should buy an invisible product that is likely to produce no financial benefit — and they should do it season after season.

Researchers developed picture books, comic books, videos and radio shows to explain the insurance. Christopher Barrett, a prominent agricultural economist at Cornell University (he’s been on The Daily Show!) who works closely with Mude, said that the group would come into a village, gather farmers, and explain the idea by leading them through a game of drawing chips from bags to determine who had losses, felling little toy plastic cows.