ILO's Impact Insurance Facility, in partnership with WBG's Global Index Insurance Facility, USAID, and Basis/I4-supported Global Action Network , hosted a webinar on index insurance that touches upon the variety of interventions such as provision, administration and management of subsidies, support for developing infrastructure for effective implementation of insurance programmes, investment in collection, and sharing of data and consumer education. In addition, the government's role in developing enabling regulations and using insurance as a part of their social protection and agriculture

On October 11, 2016, Joseph A. Owuor of The Insurance Regulatory Authority of Kenya presented a presentation entitled "Kenyan Experience with Parametric Insurance" at a workshop in Guatemala. Aimed at raising awareness on parametric insurance among supervisory authorities in Latin America and the Caribbean , t he First Regional Workshop on Parametric Insurance was put together by Microinsurance Catastrophe Risk Organisation (Micro) and participated by many stakeholders such as Access to Insurance Initiative, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (Columbia University)

In Proparco's Private Sector & Development magazine, Chloe Dugger, Operations Officer in WBG's Finance and Markets Global Practice, and Rachel Sberro, Research Analyst on agriculture finance, write about WBG's Global Index Insurance Facility's experiences with index-based insurance in Senegal and Bangladesh. Their article focuses on micro- and meso-level approaches to distributing agricultural index insurance, which speeds up claims settlement by dispensing with loss assessments and payouts are determined on an objective basis, eliminating the risk of fraud. Please visit Proparco's Private

Satellite Technology and its continued advancement is critical to the relevance and accuracy of index insurance products as a counter against weather-related risks. The World Bank Group’s Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF) in partnership with its regional partners has been working with researchers and scientists to refine satellite technology for index insurance product design.

The development of sustainable index-insurance markets requires enabling legal and regulatory environments The adoption of the “CIMA Book VII” on April 5th 2012 was a major milestone allowing and regulating the development ofmicroinsurance and index-insurance for 15 countries in the Inter-African Conference on the Insurance Market or CIMA region In addition to this regional regulatory change, the Global Index-insurance Facility (GIIF) has supported national insurance supervision agencies with this transition. In particular, GIIF has assisted the Senegalese Insurance Supervision Agency with the

While access to credit is a key instrument toalleviate rural poverty, microfinance institutions(MFIs) are often unable to expand their agriculturelending portfolio. One of the key constraints thatMFIs face is the exposure of agriculture lending toshocks such as drought, flood, or locust which can putfarmers in a situation where they are unable to repaytheir loans. Major agriculture shocks can indeed leadto loan defaults and bank runs therefore resultingin destruction of risk capital, reduced access toliquidity, decreased lending and sometimes insolvency.Evidence shows that credit supply

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

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

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.

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 burial