Attachments
1. Introduction
1.1. Project summary
The Innovation for African Climate Risk Insurance (InACRI) project aims to develop an improved crop insurance product that addresses the problem of basis risk inter alia for small scale farmers. The project targets small scale maize farmers in Meru County. The overall goal of the project is to improve the current poor performance and uptake of index-based crop insurance products in Kenya. To achieve this goal, the project is implementing a study to assess farmers needs and willingness to pay for agricultural insurance in three phases.
The first phase entailed a reconnaissance study that aimed to do focus group discussions (FGDs) with maize farmers (men and women) and experts as well. The goal of the reconnaissance was to gather contextual details on our study area. Such detail included identifying the main agricultural (climate) risks to the farmers, approximating awareness about insurance, and identifying barriers to scaling out crop insurance. The second phase entailed a household survey. The reconnaissance and the household survey are described in detail in the following sections. The third phase of the project entails a lab in the field experiment. The goal of this experiment is to elicit farmers’ willingness to pay for crop insurance using experimental approaches. Finally, the fourth phase will entail piloting an insurance cover for maize based on the findings from the farmer needs assessment and willingness to pay experiment. This document is a preliminary report of the findings from the reconnaissance exercise and the household survey. The report is organized as follows. First, we briefly describe the context in Meru County mainly highlighting the findings from the reconnaissance study and production systems. Description of the production systems is a combination of information from the reconnaissance study and a geospatial analysis by the CIAT team. Second, we describe the methodology used in the household survey– sampling and survey tools. Third, we provide preliminary findings from the survey touching on demographics, and farmers’ risk and crop insurance preferences. We finally provide some conclusions and recommendations.