Sub-Saharan Africa

Turning the tide on rural poverty requires innovative new products

Sat, 12/27/2014

Topics:

Country:

Fifty-five year old Niyitegeka Veneranda lives in rural Rwanda. She and her husband are parents to seven children and grandparents to five. They farm less than a hectare of their own land, yet she has been able to build a small house, feed her family, and send her last three children to school. She expanded her rice production recently with a loan from a local bank made possible through agricultural insurance, and plans to expand her acreage with another loan next year.

Jun

5th Annual Africa Insurers and Reinsurers Conference

Topics:

Premium subsidies

Product distribution

Year:

2015

The 2015 Africa Insurance & Reinsurance Conference will keep you up-to-date with the latest industry developments, marketing strategies and product innovations relevant for the African market. New technologies, development of new client segments and the overall economic growth in the continent is not only forcing regional insurers to rethink the way they conduct business but also forcing the global players to look at Africa as a strategic market for growth. At the 4th Annual Africa Insurance and Reinsurance Conference, will focus on key fundamentals to the business of insurance and...

Nov

Agriculture Insurance Conference - How can we make it work to contribute to food security?

Topics:

Weather index

Product distribution

Year:

2014

The Conference will focus on how agricultural insurance and food security are linked and how this link is relevant for future development efforts. It will sharpen the understanding under what circumstances and how agricultural insurance can best contribute to food security and provides a platform to share experiences. The Conference welcomes food security and agricultural insurance experts, development organizations, insurance policy makers and regulators, academia and representatives from the private sector. View AIC 2014 panelist interviews here .

Nov

10th International Microinsurance Conference 2014

Topics:

Weather index

Product distribution

Micro-level

Year:

2014

From 11 to 13 November 2014, the 10th International Microinsurance Conference will take place in Mexico City. Around 500 participants and experts from around the world will exchange views and discuss the challenges of microinsurance. The participants will include representatives of insurance and reinsurance companies, international organisations, NGOs and development-aid agencies as well as academics, policymakers, and supervisory regulators.

Weather Index-Based Insurance: An ex ante Evaluation for Cotton Cameroon

Content owner:

Antoine Leblois

Author:

Antoine Leblois

Topics:

Data

Full Publication Cotton is the major cash crop of Cameroon, however, even if it represents a quarter of agricultural exports it is only about six percent of total exports (Gergerly, 2009). The cotton society: SODECOTON (Soci´et´e de D´eveloppement du Coton du Cameroun) and the CMDT its Malian counterpart, are the only West African cotton societies that are still public monopsonies. Those parastatals are thus the only agent in the country to buy cot- ton from producers at pan-seasonally and -territorially fixed price (Delpeuch and Leblois, forthcoming). The national cotton producers...

Weather Index-Based Insurance in a Cash Crop Regulated Sector: Ex Ante Evaluation for Cottom Producers in Cameroon

Author:

Antoine Leblois, Philippe Quirion, Benjamin Sultan

Topics:

Data

Source: ILO Impact Insurance Full publication In the Sudano-sahelian region, which includes Northern Cameroon, the inter-annual variability of the rainy season is high and irrigation is scarce. As a consequence, bad rainy seasons have a massive impact on crop yield and regularly entail food crises. Traditional insurances based on crop damage assessment are not available because of asymmetric information and high transaction costs compared to the value of production. Moreover the important spatial variability of the weather creates a room for pooling the impact of bad weather using index-based...

Offering rainfall insurance to informal insurance groups: Evidence from Ethiopia

Author:

Stefan Dercon, Ruth Vargas Hill, DanielClarke, Ingo Outes-Leon Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse

Topics:

Data

Weather index

We show theoretically that the presence of basis risk in index insurance makes it a complement to informal risk sharing, implying that index insurance crowds-in risk sharing and leading to a prediction that demand will be higher among groups of individuals that can share risk. We report results from Ethiopia from a first attempt to marketweather insurance to informal risk-sharing groups.

The Landscape of Microinsurance in Africa

Content owner:

International Labor Organization

Topics:

General

Micro-level

Full Publication In various forms microinsurance has been available to some low-income people in Africa for a number of years. Cooperative Insurers have serviced a market that spans the income ranges since the 1970s. In the 1980s, community-based health insurance schemes, especially in West Africa, followed the Bamako Initiative. In the mid-1990s, commercial insurers began to enter the market offering specialized microinsurance products. Informal microinsurance has been available for decades in a range of forms, from “tontines” in West Africa or “friend in need” groups in East Africa to...