ILRI MSc Graduate Fellowship: Making Index Insurance Fully Available for Women (MIIFAW) at International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

Scope of Work

The project titled “Making Index Insurance Fully Available for Women (MIIFAW)“ is implementing a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with pastoralists women savings and business groups in Kenya. These groups have graduated from BOMA’s Rural Entrepreneur Access Program (REAP). 200 groups were randomly assigned into the treatment group and another 200 groups into control. Groups belonging to the treatment group are encouraged to create an additional savings account where money is deposited by group members for purposes of purchasing insurance. In addition, the project developed and rolled out a curriculum for training the women.

The MIIFAW project promotes a new insurance product aimed at helping women secure their households’ needs and assets from the impact of drought. While there is an existing insurance product commercially available to households in the region, that product provides coverage for drought-related livestock forage scarcity. But drought can impact individuals that do not herd, either because someone else in their household generates a large component of the household’s income herding animals or because they have an alternative livelihood strategy that, while not herding, relies on the income of herders, for example local businesses. In developing a product that can provide households and businesses coverage against drought shocks, we hope to make insurance fully available to women.

The graduate fellow will support the implementation of the project including data collection. He/she is expected to utilize project data for thesis. This fellowship will further strengthen collaboration with local academic institutions.

Responsibilities of the fellow:

• Clean and analyze experimental data to assess the effect of village insurance savings account (VISA) on insurance uptake and welfare of pastoralists.
• Monitor data quality and facilitate coordination with the field teams.
• Implement field work as assigned by the supervisors.
• Co-author reports and manuscripts.
• Preparation of research proposal and thesis for purposes of academic attainment

Requirements & qualifications:

• Completed BSc in development related studies.
• Newly enrolled into an MSc program to an MSc program in Agricultural and Applied Economics in a recognized university.
• Demonstrated experience in organizing and coordinating fieldwork.
• Possess experience in data collection using digital surveys and basic data analysis in the form of summary statistics.
• Proficiency in written and spoken English language.
• Have good working knowledge of MS Office packages.