I sit in a village in northern Ethiopia, surrounded by foothills covered with eucalyptus and cactuses. Camels wander in packs and hawks fly overhead. Bone-thin oxen and donkeys plod around wearily in the harsh sun. Stone is the single resource with no shortage—the houses and terraces are made from it and many of the fields look closer to a rock pits than arable land. Some thunderheads settle in the mountains above, drenching them with moisture, casting thin gray clouds over the valley and offering us some momentary protection from the sun.
It is so bright here that photographs at midday are pointless, the glare from any surface simply washes them out. I wear long sleeves and hide in the wispy shade of acacia trees and listen to the proceedings in Tigrinya. “Thirteen months of sunshine,” is a common phrase in Ethiopia. It seems like hyperbole until you realize there are, in fact, 13 months in the ancient Ethiopian calendar, which is almost as old as the branch of Christianity most Ethiopians still practice.
I work on a project to help poor farmers become more resilient to weather shocks, especially droughts. In Ethiopia, farmers rely on the uncertain arrival of rainfall to grow their crops and have little recourse if the season’s rains prove inadequate. Individual farmers (or even village collectives) do not have the capacity to cope with an unpredictable, often pernicious climate. One solution to the persistent problem of food security is to give these farmers access to the same tools regularly used in our western world. If you wreck your car, you contact your insurance company. If you die prematurely, you have life insurance. If something bad happens, we have developed the means to deal with adversity. Farmers, no matter how poor, have some such means too, but there’s a point where these systems get overwhelmed.
The Good Pays for the Bad
One cutting-edge solution involves microinsurance—a concept uniquely positioned to help the good years pay for the bad years. The farmers make a small payment every year, and if there is a drought severe enough to affect their crops, they get their money back at harvest time. It’s not a gift or a subsidy, but a payment augmenting what they’re already doing, a means of making their considerable efforts even more effective. It helps them when they can’t help themselves—a bridge to better times.
Microinsurance may be the next economic revolution in Africa—the first being microfinance, or small loans to encourage economic growth on an individual scale. Farmers can, for example, take a loan for better seeds and fertilizer that will enable them to grow more food. But farmers are often reluctant to borrow money if they fear they will be unable to repay due to circumstances beyond their control, like the weather. An uncertain climate can affect farmers even before they plant their seeds and reduce harvests, even when rainfall is plentiful. If we offer them some protection from an uncertain climate, they can confidently invest in making their farms more bountiful. In this sense, microinsurance is exciting for its built-in potential.
Educational Games
Today, we’re playing educational games with villagers, using ping-pong balls of different colors green, yellow, red—which represent good, moderate and bad years for their crops. The farmers buy simulated insurance contracts, and the group draws a ball to determine, for the purposes of the game, if it was a good, bad or moderate year. As an economist, I’m trained to think of incentives and how people might use situations to their advantage. I expect that the farmers will want to see a red ball because this means a bad year and, because of the insurance, the biggest payout in the game. To my surprise, the green ball is the most popular, even though it provides the least immediate benefit. I see the deep connection to farming in the participants. Although this is just a simulation, a game with a good year of rainfall is more enjoyable to many of the participants than one with insurance money for drought.
In the Tigray region, fields are measured by the timad (the area of land that can be ploughed in one day by a pair of oxen—generally 1/8 hectare). The harvest is weighed by the quintal (100 kilograms or 220 pounds). The women wear homemade cotton dresses, their hair in tight cornrows splayed out in back. One or two spin tiny hand looms as we talk. The men wear khakis and lightweight shawls to deflect some of the heat. The children wear western clothes, now starting to fray, and pay keen interest to the ferengi sitting among them.
Tigray is famous for the powerful Axumite empire, which peaked at the same time as Rome. The city of Axum, near the border with Eritrea, is on a small valley littered with towering obelisks of intricately carved granite, referred to as the Stelae. Weighing several tons each, the Stelae teeter hundreds of feet in the air, crowned with a curious half-circle shape. They stand impassive, monuments to the ingenuity of the Ethiopian people, erected long enough ago that their origins are still a mystery.
For many Americans, Ethiopia will forever be associated with images of starving children during the devastating famine of 1984. That famine was half a lifetime ago, but hunger persists in every corner of the continent. The prevention of a similar catastrophe drives microinsurance projects all over Africa. Such a revolution is beginning in fits and starts, as multinational organizations recognize microinsurance as one area where beneficial
An uncertain climate can affect farmers even before they plant their seeds.
development might also be good business. Swiss–based agribusiness conglomerate Syngenta uses cell phone technology to offer weather insurance to seed buyers in Kenya. LeapFrog Investments, a for-profit fund which bills itself as “the world’s first micro-insurance fund,” recently raised $140 million in capital for investment in microinsurance in developing countries, and academic researchers have studied microinsurance networks with groups as diverse as Kenyan pastoralists and Malawian groundnut farmers. All over Africa, diverse groups are building microinsurance programs to protect farmers.
Although the continent is marked by proud traditions and great promise, it also faces an uncertain future. Protection from climate extremes through microinsurance might offer African farmers the opportunities they need to prosper. As the day comes to an end, I feel a mixture of emotion—respect for the farmers and concern for the challenges they face. The farmers are cheerful as they finish our insurance game. I cannot help but be left with the same optimism, mindful that although there is a long way to go, we are indeed taking the first steps.
Michael Norton is a Staff Associate at the International Research Institute of Climate and Society (IRI) at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi from 2002 to 2004.
Photo by Michael Norton.