Horn of africa Bulletin

This paper draws on fieldwork in Isiolo, Kenya, to make a contextual case for the uptake of livestock insurance as a resilience mechanism to overcome the effects of climate change on livelihoods. The paper is approached from a gendered perspective to account for women’s agency in seeking livelihood safety. This paper invites peacebuilders to examine lessons that they can learn from insurance agents. A commonality across the two fields (insurance and peacebuilding) is the sense of safety in the context of uncertainties brought by climate change. The paper applies the notion of the ‘mental landscape’ by bringing field anecdotes on people's sense of agency and, in particular, how their experiences and sense of safety influence the decisions they make.