 In Kenya's dry lands, drought has always been the greatest hazard faced by livestock herding families. Modern pressures are making this situation worse. Since herders rely on livestock, the recent great animal losses have been devastating. Many pastoral communities are struggling. Science and research organizations have tried for years to help these communities improve the incomes. But the region is large, remote from urban resources, and underdeveloped, so traditional approaches have had little impact. My name is Andromude. Alida research team working to help herders manage the risks of drought. We're using state-of-the-art technologies to give them more options when the animals are in trouble. The situation for livestock herders in Northern Kenya has worsened in recent decades. Populations are growing where water and grazing are available. But this is putting the land under pressure, with natural resources getting increasingly scarce. All these factors are worsening the impact of severe droughts, four of which occurred in the last 10 years. Resulting severe forage shortages are killing many livestock, leaving growing numbers of poor herd of families unable to restock. With few jobs in the area, many are becoming dependent on food aid. For years, development organizations have tried to find ways to improve incomes in these areas. But remoteness from cities, long distances between basic facilities, poor infrastructure, and low and variable rainfall have prevented success. Against this background, a group of researchers from several countries came together in 2007. We were determined to help, but knew our solutions had to be radical. We believed we had to develop an insurance scheme for livestock kept in a pastoral setting, though insurance is the most effective way to manage risk. Poor remote herding communities have never had access to insurance cover. To change this, we had to answer some basic questions. How would insurance companies verify animal deaths over such large areas? How could poor communities afford insurance premiums? We started by seeking a cheap method of assessing animal losses without having to verify their deaths. Knowing that when pasture remains poor for long periods, animals die, we searched for a way to evaluate the state of the pasture the animals were eating. We discovered we could take advantage of low cost, accessible, and reliable data on pasture availability by tapping into existing satellite imagery of the earth's surface. This provided high-resolution pictures of the state of vegetation on the ground. The pastoralist regions of Marcibet district in northern Kenya became the pilot site because unusually good historical data on livestock mortality existed for the area. With this information, we could statistically match our readings of forage availability to records of animal deaths. Our resulting computer models indicated that satellite-based readings of forage availability can accurately predict average livestock losses within a target area. The strength of this data link allowed us to design insurance contracts that would cover livestock losses by referring to satellite-generated assessments of forage. The next challenge was testing the insurance scheme among herding communities. To tackle the problem of educating the herders about insurance, we developed a game based on the pastoral production system. In our game, one white sheep represents one cow, and one green sheep represents one sheep more goat. In the game, players, our potential customers, face the choices they experience with their livestock during droughts. This helps them understand how insurance works, how losses can be minimized with insurance, and the conditions under which their new insurance policies would and would not pay out. Our next step was to make the insurance package commercially viable. This was a hurdle since no organization had ever managed to develop and pilot such insurance anywhere in the world. Fortunately, Equity Bank was already setting up infrastructure to deliver financial products in Marseille and agreed to act as the insurance agent. UAP Insurance Company was then recruited to underwrite the risk with Swiss Free Insurance Coverage. With all the necessary pieces finally in place, a pilot insurance product for Marseille was launched onto the market in January 2010. We are very happy that our animals are now being insured. You see drought is coming after every one, six months, after one year. So we are in danger, and the only resource that we have is livestock, and they are dying in a very big number. So we are very happy. That's why you see the turn-up is good. Previously, even people had shied away from banking industry in this area before Equity came in, and now when Equity came in quite a number and already started to work with the bank. So when we bring in insurance for the livestock farmers, that product has really helped us even go out there and be able to talk to the personnel, even the ones who didn't believe about banking before. In the long run, we expect quite a number, even up ones of 70%, to be able to embrace this new product. About 2,000 contracts were sold in the first month, and we think demand will grow. Of course, we need to evaluate results from the pilot, but already we have been asked to scale up the product across similar Kenyan districts and establish its viability in neighboring countries. We can now see this approach as huge potential for all the other herding communities who keep animals, not only in this region, but in similar areas throughout Africa.