This paper describes an action research process undertaken with four African agricultural carbon projects—CARE’s Sustainable Agriculture in Changing Climate Initiative in Western Kenya; World Vision’s Assisted Natural Regeneration Project in Humbo, Ethiopia; Vi Agroforestry’s Western Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project; and ECOTRUST’s Trees for Global Benefits in Uganda—to explore their institutional changes as project managers and communities work to build local capacity for project management.

Recently, the development and humanitarian relief communities have directed attention to building resilience of pastoral communities to droughts and other shocks. While resilience thinking has much to offer, using resilience as a framework for investing in disaster risk reduction and development faces numerous challenges. Development implies that people are actively changing, which poses the question of whether such changes are adaptations or transformations, or whether this is a subjective or academic distinction.

This study develops an index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) product for managing key livestock asset risks of pastoralists in the arid and semi-arid lands of northern Kenya, where insurance markets are effectively absent and uninsured risk exposure is a main cause of persistent poverty.

The dialogue on Ethiopian Agricultural Development was organized by the Ministry of

Agriculture and Rural Development (MoARD) of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia

and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) to honour Professor Gebisa Ejeta,

winner of the 2009 World Food Prize. The dialogue was held on 12 November 2009 at the

United Nations Conference Centre. It was opened by H.E. Ato Girma Woldegiorgis, President

of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.