On November 19th, 2019, Fatou Assah, GIIF program manager, and John Plevin, Financial Sector Specialist of Crisis and Disaster Risk Finance (CDRF) co-hosted a tech session as part of the FCI Knowledge Exchange Week in Washington DC.

 

Agricultural insurance can provide vulnerable agriculturalists with certainty in the face of natural disasters such as drought, reducing dependence on harmful coping mechanisms, and ultimately leading to increased financial resilience of the individual and the wider community and economy. This 90-minute tech session provided an overview of how the World Bank and IFC jointly support governments, private sector insurers, and households to manage financially in an increasingly volatile world.

 

Three country cases (Zambia, Nigeria, and Pakistan) were presented and discussed at this tech session. Mr. Mweene Monga, Director for Business Development at Mayfair Insurance Company Zambia, gave an overview of agriculture insurance in Zambia and how the company works with a variety of aggregators to offer protection to farmers, with the support of World Bank Group; Ms. Funmi Omokhodion, Regional Director of Africa Re, offered the example of Nigeria and how it deals with challenges in offering agriculture insurance in the country, including data scarcity, low financial literacy, and technical capacity. Mr. Irfan Razzaq from “Strengthening Markets for Agriculture and Rural Transformation in Punjab” (SMART) Program-for-Results (P4R) in Pakistan, explained the latest development of the World Bank-sponsored SMART Punjab Project (P4R) in Pakistan, which is an area yield index-based crop insurance, piloted in 2018. 

 

This tech session attracted about 20 colleagues from global and regional offices under Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation Global Practice in the World Bank Group to share their experiences and exchange ideas on agriculture insurance.