By Ilona Eveleens
NANYUKI, Kenya Â? After two years of drought, the rains now falling in Kenya are not bringing the expected relief for Kenya's farmers. Why? Erratic weather means no one knows when to put in a crop anymore.
"We are confused. It rains in the dry season. Has the rainy season of April and May shifted to now, or is this extra? It's hard to decide when to plant," remarks Rose Wanjiru while she inspects the maize in her field near Nanyuki, at the foot of Mount Kenya. Overhead, dark rain clouds - once a rarity in March - hide the peak of the highest mountain of the country from the view.
But bewildered low-income farmers now have a new means of coping with the growing uncertainty: a pioneering crop insurance program.
"At first I didn't trust insurance. I thought it was a trick to get hold of my money. But now I know it is not a scam," said Wanjiru, a subsistence farmer who is among the first Kenyan small-scale farmers to receive insurance payments after losing their crops to drought.
"I bought the seeds for this maize with the payout of the insurance. I got the money because my harvest dried up during the drought last year," she said.
COMPENSATION 'IF THINGS GO BAD'
A life-long farmer, Wanjiru says farming in Kenya feels more and more like gambling thanks to climate change, which has contributed to record droughts and unseasonal rains and flooding around the country.
"The insurance puts me a little bit at ease because I know I will be compensated if things go bad," she said.
Almost half of the Kenyans live below the nation's poverty line. Insurance in the past was considered something for the nation's rich, and far too expensive for its poor.
But now a variety of low-cost insurance schemes are gearing up across the country, offering policies aimed at those with low incomes.
Since the start of the year, nomads who wander with their cattle mostly in the north of Kenya have been able to buy policies on their livestock. Such pastoralists were hard hit during Kenya's recent multi-year drought, which led to widespread animal deaths.
Other families have invested in Changamka (Cheer Up), a primary healthcare policy that lets Kenyans pay a little under $6 a year for doctor visits, tests and medicines.
The latest policy on offer is Kilimo Salama, or Safe Farming, aimed at Kenya's predominant farmer - the small-scale agriculturalist who plants mainly for their own consumption. Many last year were reduced to relying on food aid to survive as Kenya's longstanding drought parched their fields.
The program is a cooperative effort between the Kenyan insurance firm UAP, the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, and Safaricom, Kenya's mobile phone giant.
Every time farmers buy seeds, fertilizer or agro-chemicals from certain manufacturers, they can insure the inputs. The insurance costs 10 percent of the price of the purchased products and the cost is equally split between the farmer and the manufacturer.
MOBILE PHONE BASED SYSTEM
The same shops that provide agricultural supplies also sell the insurance. They take pictures of the purchased products with a mobile phone and then, using the mobile phone network, send the info to a central computer together with the phone number and name of the buyer.
Within seconds a text message is sent to the phone of the insured farmer with all the details of the policy.
"Last year it was hard to get costumers interested in the insurance. Insurance is an unknown thing for most people," said Lucy Muriuki, who runs a small, busy shop in the centre of Nanyuki.
"Only when they heard that neighbors were paid out because their harvest dried did trust in the product grow," she said.
"Now I sell many insurance (policies) a day and the number of costumers has at least doubled," Muriuki said. She has had to hire extra staff to attend to all her customers, she said.
Many new customers want to hear every detail about the new insurance. Farmer John Mwangi, for instance, tells Muriuki he wants an explanation of how the insurance company will know whether his crop was destroyed or not.
"It is hard to understand that UAP can decide without coming to have a look at my farm," he mumbles. "It makes it harder to trust a product but, then again, I saw how it worked for my neighbor."
The decision on whether to make an insurance payout is determined from data collected from 30 or so weather stations, the first of a network of about 500 expected to be erected around the country.
PAYOUTS DETERMINED REMOTELY
Scientists have created a formula where rain, wind and sunshine are measured, and the combination determines whether a harvest is likely to be drowned or dried up. If so, a payout is automatically issued to policyholders in the area, without individual farm visits.
"In the old days, people of insurance companies had to go physically to check out whether there was damage. It's now the computer program that decides and it saves the insurance (company) manpower and travel expenses. That's why the insurance can be affordable for low income people," said Rose Goslinga, a Dutch economist who works for the Syngenta Foundation.
The weather stations are mostly positioned on farms or in schoolyards for security reasons so no one can tamper with them. The data is automatically sent, using solar power in most cases, to a central computer.
For now, the insurance policies are on sale to farmers in five agricultural areas of Kenya. But the partners in Kilimo Salama hope to cover most of the country by the end of the year.
"Kenya is a good country to introduce insurance like this because almost every Kenyan owns a mobile telephone. And a lot of weather data over the past decades is available, which made it easier for the scientists to develop a system where we know whether a crop has been destroyed by either rain or drought," Goslinga said.
The effort "is running better than we expected this year," she said, with almost 2,000 insurance policies sold just in the past six weeks. She said the group hopes to sell 5,000 policies by the end of the year.
Syngenta's involvement in the insurance effort has raised some eyebrows in Kenya. The Swiss company is best know for its manufacturing of genetically modified crops, which Kenya has so far allowed to be planted only on a test basis.
However, the Syngenta foundation, a social development arm of the company that is involved in the insurance effort, works only with hybrid seed, Goslinga said.
Insurance for poor people and low-income farmers is a relatively new field for many insurance companies, but there is a growing realisation that there is money to earn from small fees paid by potentially millions of people.
"This insurance really helps a lot of Kenyans," said Atia Yahya, who developed Changamka, Kenya's new health insurance offering. "Wouldn't it be great if we could offer people a holistic (insurance) package for all their need? All the insurances together, from which the costumer can take a pick."
Ilona Eveleens is a freelance writer based in Nairobi.
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