The Partnership Forum is the annual meeting of the InsuResilience Global Partnership, bringing together all members and partners, from governments to representatives of international organizations, civil society, the private sector and academia. The Partnership Forum serves as platform to exchange experience and knowledge and to raise awareness about climate risk finance and insurance. As an active member in this Global Partnership, GIIF participated in this year’s forum together with its long-term implementation partner ACRE Africa. The event was held as a 4-day virtual event from 7-10 December 2020. 

 

This year’s theme "Protecting development in a changing climate risk environment" focused on the increasing frequency of climate shocks and the compounded risks faced by communities. The forum also covered the issue of disproportionate burden on poor and vulnerable people facing these climate-related events, as well as increasing health risks due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Discussions throughout the Forum highlighted ways to preserve development gains through strategic collaboration, anticipatory action and designing disaster risk management instruments that are suitable for purpose.

 

GIIF and ACRE Africa, represented by the Program Manager, Fatou Assah, and by the CEO George Kuria, respectively, attended the panel on “Monitoring and evaluation implementation at the project level”, which focuses on the effects of Climate and Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance solutions. The session also covered the importance of local partnerships and ownership of these risk management strategies to building resilience.  Other participants at the panel were from GIZ, Munich Climate Insurance Initiative, SYLCAN Trust and WFP. For the full 4-day event info, please click here and for the panel video here. 

 

In this piece, Mr. Kuria shares with us his reflections on the session and the evolution of the monitoring and evaluation process within ACRE Africa over the years.

 

George Kuria: The session was informative and interesting as we heard from other partners, exchanged ideas and shared our experiences within our respective organizations. It is always very insightful to interact with different partners who work on similar issues in various parts of the world and hear their approaches to issues that we also face in our work on a regular basis. 

 

Regarding the monitoring and evaluation process within ACRE Africa, it is important to highlight that we work towards results and indicators because we believe that these two components go hand in hand. We set up milestones and also constantly check on our progress. In our work, 3 things are important to track: i) product development, ii) distribution, and iii) monitoring the growing season. These components tell us whether the product is responsive enough and whether we are increasing our numbers, adding new partners and increasing volume per partner. All these components help us come up with the best way to ensure that farmers are covered and protected against disasters. 

 

My key takeaways from the session would be the areas around scalability and partnerships. In ACRE Africa, we believe that there needs to be a rigorous way to measure scalability and also the multiplicity of activities around the same region should ensure that there is coordination among various partners so that the activities lead to impactful results over the longer term.