The insurance role of education in pastoralist communities

Turkana pastoralists are exposed to risk that threatens their livelihoods. Their reliance on herding in semi-arid, isolated environments leads to pervasive uncertainty and limited opportunities to mitigate shocks. In this project, we will gather interview data to examine whether education improves resilience by (i) supporting additional income opportunities and (ii) building knowledge to better respond to negative shocks, complementing or replacing traditional risk mitigation strategies. This project built on, and developed, our work on the project Poor among the pastoralists: The importance of bad luck for inequality.

PI and Co-Is - International Collaborators

PI: Dr Rebecca Mancy, Social and Public Health Sciences Unit and School of Education, University of Glasgow

Co-I: Dr Konstantinos Angelopoulos, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow

Co-I: Dr Elissaios Papyrakis, Associate Professor in Development Economics, ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Co-I/ODA Partner: Dr Dorice Agol, Friends of Lake Turkana, Kenya

Start and End date

1 September 2019 – 30 June 2020.

Funder and Funding amount

GCRF Internal Call, External Funder (SFC), £27,240