This article uses the odd Lindley-G family of distributions to propose and study a new compound distribution called “odd Lindley-Kumaraswamy distribution”. In this article, the density and distribution functions of the odd Lindley-Kumaraswamy distribution are defined and studied by deriving and discussing many properties of the distribution such as the ordinary moments, moment generating function, characteristics function, quantile function, reliability functions, order statistics and other useful measures. The unknown model parameters are also estimated by the method of maximum likelihood. The goodness-of-fit of the proposed distribution is demonstrated using two real life datasets. The results show that the proposed distribution outperforms the other fitted compound models selected for this study and hence it is a flexible generalization of the Kumaraswamy distribution.