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Capacity Building - Haiti

52% of the population in Haiti lives in rural areas. However, Haitian agriculture historically remained unprofitable and financial credit to agriculture represents less than 1% of the total loan portfolio of banks. As a consequence, 60% of the food consumed in Haiti is imported. Agricultural production is severely affected by natural catastrophes such as excessive rain, hurricane strength winds, and droughts.
Project type:

Capacity Building

Requesting Agency:

Minister of Finance of the Republic of Haiti

Project rationale:

The Government of Haiti has insurance from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, but in addition would like to explore the possibility of financial risk transfer mechanisms to protect the agriculture sector against the damage caused by tropical storms, to expand the agriculture credit market, and to make agriculture insurance available to smallholder farmers.

Key achievements:
  • The WB GIIF Team produced a report on strategies for weather risk financing in Haiti, including an overall analysis of the country framework for the management of weather risk in the agricultural sector, as well as possible strategies to improve such management in the short and medium term.
  • A three-day training on the technical issues related to weather and hydrological data was prepared, followed by a technical training module on the financial aspects of index-based and macro-level insurance.
  • To address the serious shortcomings in the historic weather data records and the weather station network, the WBG GIIF Team produced a gridded weather database that calibrates historic satellite data with historic weather station data to provide a complete history of rainfall and temperature data for the last 30 years in both parts of the Hispaniola island (Haiti and Dominican Republic). This will support feasibility studies, product design, and pricing.
  • The WBG GIIF Team worked closely with the WB team implementing the first project that is implementing a new strengthened insurance regulation and supervision.
Key stakeholders:

WB team implementing the FIRST project

Contacts:

Fatou Assah
Program Manager
World Bank group
Tel: +1 202 473 6160
Fassah@worldbank.org