The AAIB, Sri Lanka’s national agricultural insurer, partnered with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to modernize agricultural insurance provision in the country. Kasundari, the Team Lead for the project, joined us to share their experience in digitizing agricultural information as part of this project. Background Imagine having to walk through a paddy tract consisting of hundreds of small fields in a rural area, sometimes without proper roads, seeking to identify a particular paddy of land. The mission is to verify an insurance claim in that field. For insurers offering...

With the outbreak yet to be contained, the COVID-19 crisis is steadily amassing damages across various sectors such as health, transportation, trade, tourism, to name a few. While the impact/pressure to agriculture sector is less pronounced, disruption in the value chains has been observed in dynamics of food supply and demand in conjunction of reducing purchasing power, logistical barriers and trade blockages. With the start of typhoon, monsoon and hurricane season in different parts of the world as well as weather uncertainty in the upcoming crop seasons in arid and semi-arid regions,...

At the time of writing, disruptions on food production, agricultural supply chains and markets have not been materialized; however, the pandemic is directly affecting food systems through impact on food supply and demand, and indirectly through decreases in purchasing power as well as logistical barriers and trade blockages. Learning from past pandemic, for instance during the 2014 Ebola crisis, lockdowns in West Africa had several negative impacts on farmers’ livelihoods including curbing access to markets both for input purchase and produce sale as well as reducing the availability of...

Ingrid-Gabriela Hoven, Director General at Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) reflects in an interview with GIIF on Germany’s commitment to fight climate change . At COP25, Germany pledged more than EUR 100million to support climate risk finance and insurance solutions under the InsuResilience Global Partnership, EUR10million of which are to support GIIF in 2020-2022. GIIF: What do you think about the outcome of the most recent COP25 in Madrid? COP25 stayed well behind expectations as it did not deliver concrete results in many crucial areas. Several...