Kenya's Satellite-Triggered Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI), Marsabit

Launched in Marsabit County in January 2010 by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Cornell University, Equity Bank and UAP Insurance, Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) was the world's first livestock insurance product for remote pastoralists, designed to pay out before drought kills animals rather than compensating after the fact.

Instead of assessing individual herds, IBLI uses NASA's satellite-derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to estimate forage availability; when the index falls below a locally calibrated threshold linked to an ILRI/Cornell econometric model of the NDVI-mortality relationship (built from 2012), all policyholders in that area automatically receive a payout, regardless of individual losses.

By 2015 the ILRI-led scheme had expanded to five counties in Kenya and one zone in Ethiopia, selling 7,454 policies and paying $118,170 in compensation to 3,011 Kenyan policyholders, alongside 2,613 policies and $30,836 paid to 523 herders in Ethiopia; from 2015, roughly 100 pastoralists began contributing smartphone-based ground-truth vegetation readings to improve satellite-map accuracy. A parallel Kenyan-government scheme built on the same model, the Kenya Livestock Insurance Programme (KLIP), reported triggering payouts of close to KSh 215 million to 12,064 pastoralists after the severe 2016/17 drought.

The mechanism is well replicated and academically documented, but its ecological evidence base is narrower than its financial one: published sources document policy uptake, payout accuracy and household welfare effects, not independently measured rangeland vegetation or soil-condition outcomes, so its benefit to grazing-land health remains plausible rather than demonstrated.