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Agricultural production is inherently subject to a variety of risks because management decisions or states-of-nature often generate future outcomes (either favorable or unfavorable) that cannot be predicted with certainty. The variability of these outcomes represents risk. Risk is frequently measured in terms of the probability of various outcomes. Agricultural producers face a variety of risks including production (yield), output price, and input price risk. Some of these risks are managed through production and fi nancial decision-making, while others are simply accepted as costs of doing...
Data and information management refers to the development, collection, use, and preservation of data and the methods needed to acquire, control, protect, deliver, and enhance its value to achieve the goals of agricultural insurance programs. Issues related to the collection, development, updating, and quality of data are often overlooked when developing agricultural insurance programs. However, such programs will likely fail without a concise, well-developed plan for data and information management. Data is needed by those who develop, operate, and manage agricultural insurance programs. In...
This manual presents theoretical concepts and applied methods commonly used for actuarial processes in agriculture insurance. Actuarial processes refer to the activities that establish insurance premium rates and related quantitative analyses. Key considerations for designing agriculture insurance programs are presented. In addition, the infl uence of program design on data requirements and the use of statistical methods for establishing insurance premiums are illustrated. The presentation presumes that readers have a solid understanding of basic statistics principles. The level of knowledge...
This manual introduces and discusses agricultural insurance and provides tools for the development, management, operation, and maintenance of such programs. Agricultural insurance includes a variety of product types, including property, causality, life, and health insurance. Throughout the manual, the term “agricultural insurance” refers to crop (and in some cases livestock insurance programs. Successful agricultural insurance programs must be thoughtfully constructed before their introduction and tailored to the unique circumstances of individual countries and regions; poorly designed...
This report explores evidence and insights from five case studies that have made significant recent progress in addressing the challenge of insuring poor smallholder farmers and pastoralists in the developing world. In India, national index insurance programmes have reached over 30 million farmers through a mandatory link with agricultural credit and strong government support. In East Africa (Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania), the Agriculture and Climate Risk Enterprise (ACRE) has recently scaled to reach nearly 200,000 farmers, bundling index insurance with agricultural credit and farm inputs...
BERLIN, November 27, 2014 —The Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF), an innovative program managed by the World Bank Group, launched today the Index Insurance Forum at the Agricultural Insurance Conference in Berlin. The Index Insurance Forum will serve as a unique forum for knowledge sharing and exchange of best practices among index-insurance practitioners and industry representatives.
Geneva, Switzerland July 24, 2014 – The International Labour Office (ILO) and the World Bank Group (WBG) have signed a memorandum of understanding that aims to provide access to improved insurance products to hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers, small businesses and individuals in Asia and Africa. The three year partnership is the first-of-its-kind within the rapidly evolving index insurance industry. The Facility and GIIF combine their strengths to improve the delivery of index insurance to farmers and their families as well as businesses, through extraction, dissemination and...
Is index insurance poised for a great leap forward similar to the rapid growth experienced by microfinance and credit bureaus in the 1990s? Index insurance clearly holds a lot of promise to help unlock productivity gains and protect farmers all around the world. Index insurance is for insuring farmers, MSMEs and individuals what credit scoring was for consumer and small business lending - a huge opportunity to make financial services much more widely available at lower cost by using smart analytics and data. In this sense, index insurance may be even more promising than microcredit because...
GIIF, a member of the World Bank Group, signed two grant agreements, with a combined value of $3.9 million, with the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture to expand index-based insurance to small-scale farmers in Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania. Index-based weather insurance can protect against the adverse effects of climate change and help to strengthen food security in rural communities.
The World Bank Group signed an agreement marking the $25 million contribution by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs in support of scaling up insurance markets in developing countries over the next five years, thus helping to ensure that agricultural insurance becomes a sustainable business model for smallholder farmers.
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