 We're here to talk about a project that's been near and dear to my heart for quite some time around index-based livestock insurance in the northern parts of Kenya. This is a project we launched quite some years ago now. This is an extremely exciting event because it's sort of given giving all of us who have worked on it these many years the chance to sit down to talk. I'm meeting some new people that weren't there at the beginning and a few people have referred to me as one of the godfathers of this so I'm meeting my children or my grandchildren or my godchildren. It's just been a very exciting opportunity to step back and see what we've learned from these many years of effort. I think the policy conference was a very brave effort. I'm an economist and economists always like to believe that their policy relevant. You know the true untold story is we're often not very good at it and we're often not necessarily very good at communicating ideas and findings to policymakers so I think it was really important to try to bring together some of the research findings to policymakers and again for me this was in a special motivation to come to this conference because Kenya itself is at the cusp of doing some very interesting and innovative things which are at least based in part on what's been happening under the under the Iblee project so I think having this effort to to try to inform policymakers in my own case I as I say I like what's going on but I also think there's some things we've been learning that I would hope could help the policymakers and the people designing these programs to do things at least a little bit differently or at least see where some of the the really hard questions that they they need to solve at least where some of those big questions are and where maybe we should try a few things out but I do think in areas such as targeting of some of these programs how they're done what the complementarities are between these programs I think there's some things we're close to learning but you know using this as an opportunity so that as the programs that are being implemented such as the expansion of the hunger safety net program or the scale out of the Iblee ideas in the Kenya livestock insurance program I think there's some really important learning opportunities here so that those programs themselves and the people they serve can be better going into the future you know the the initial excitement I think for me as someone who had written papers on on poverty dynamics the most exciting thing here was to say sure we know that we know that risk is a driver of poverty that risk can put people into extremely difficult circumstances and can leave them stuck there and that's important it's also kind of depressing and you know the big question is can you do something about it you know is there any way to fundamentally change these dynamics I mean we can all see a person who's destitute or stuck and we can all understand the case for trying to do something for that person for their children you know after the fact but I think what's so exciting about Iblee is this notion is there something we can do ahead of time that might prevent that person from getting stuck and in a sense letting them maintain their own viability I think every human being and every family would much rather feel confident that they can take care of themselves take care of their own children and that's where I think Iblee is so important is because it's it's trying to it's trying to provide a mechanism which keeps more people in that circumstance which I think we would all agree is is where we would like ourselves and our friends and other people to find themselves another thing to think about here and it's been highlighted in in the last two days of this conference and it's been with Iblee all along is the complexity of what's being attempted with Iblee the technical challenge the technologies are new or relatively new the uses of these technologies are new we've had a lot of discussion over the last few days about can we really make can we use these technologies better can they become more accurate can the insurance protection become better and I just think it's I think we still need to be extremely humble in this space so Iblee's become very well known and and you know and and for good reason and yet you know I think is has come out here we see that it can be made better and and but yet we're not sure we can actually make it any better and we're still sort of struggling with that and there's a lot more work to be done so I think the real challenge you know the challenge the scientific community is to make it better the challenges scientific communities to keep making sure the money is there to make it better but not oversell it because when things get oversold and people don't understand the complexity you can actually have governments or donor agencies or NGOs that push things out into the field which really don't have the desired qualities that really say an example of insurance really don't provide adequate insurance protection and they can get themselves in trouble or more importantly they can get farmers or pastoralists in trouble because people might think they're adequately protected they may take on some additional risks and then if the insurance contract doesn't work then suddenly people are in trouble because we thought we were doing something good but in fact maybe we weren't and so you know that's the that's the other issue