Weather insurance: swapping sweat for security

Oct 29th, 2009 4:00 PM UTC
By ONE Partners

Check out the latest partner post for our Food Security in Focus series, this time from Oxfam America. The post below describes an innovative way that Ethiopian farmers are dealing with the effects of climate change. Also be sure to check out an amazing video/slideshow by clicking on either of the images below.

-Kara Arsenault

Medhin Reda’s is an all-girl house—Medhin and three of her daughters. I knew the moment she brushed aside her daughter’s warning to dress up for her western visitors that I would like her enormously. She had just rushed in from weeding the corn patch, and she came to greet us outside her stone-walled hut high on a hill in Adi Ha—and as soon as she could, she would be back in that corn patch finishing the job.
All work. All day.

That’s the life of single mothers like Medhin here in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, where climate change is taking its toll. The rainfall is becoming increasingly erratic and making a living from the rocky soil is backbreaking and never certain. Drought can easily wipe out a season’s efforts. And hunger often follows.
But this year, Medhin, 45, has a plan. Though she doesn’t have a penny to pay for it, she has bought herself a small package of weather insurance. It’s for her teff, the tiny grain grown across Ethiopia that’s the base for a pancake-like bread called injera. If enough rain fails to fall at a certain time, the insurance will provide Medhin with a payout to cover some of her losses.

It’s a new initiative launched by Oxfam America and a host of local partners, including the Relief Society of Tigray. And its genius is in its accessibility to the poorest of the poor. Those who don’t have cash—and many don’t—can pay for their premiums with the single most important asset they do have: their sweat. Two hundred small farmers in Adi Ha signed up for the insurance; 65 percent of them are swapping work for premiums. They’ll be tackling projects that make them less vulnerable to drought.

Medhin is trading 24 days of labor for the comfort of knowing that if her teff crop fails for lack of rain, her family will get critical assistance in its time of need. The insurance will make sure of that.

“It’s good for me to have the insurance as long as I can work and pay with labor,” she said before heading back to her corn patch. “That is the only asset I have.”

-Coco McCabe, Oxfam America

Photos courtesy of Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

TAGS: Climate and Development, Food Security in Focus, From Our Partners, Oxfam