As part of the latest International Conference on Inclusive Insurance (ICII) with around 1000 participants from over 120 countries discussing how to make insurance more inclusive, and during Day 3 when attendees where discussing the Challenges of Reaching the Client, the Director of Hollard Mozambique (Israel Muchena) brought up important lessons learned from successful education programs, mentioning the Ngano of Lazy Hare and the Drought story developed for awareness of insurance based on traditional Mozambican tale.

In the introduction to risk through an ancient African oral story (Ngano), indigenous knowledge resources could play a key role in development of risk literacy material that speaks the language of the target population. "Insurance is an alien concept to our target audience. And if they can’t relate to it, there will be little uptake.”

“…Giving the people what they want, in the case of Mozambique and the wider Sub-Saharan Africa, means using bantu languages and the folklore tradition of ngano to tell stories of drought and other risks in a language and format that indigenous farmers can relate to. We came up with an interesting story about understanding risks, and how in the past farmers had tried to come up with solutions. It’s a story all farmers can relate to.” Insurers have got to re-examine their assumptions, said Israel. “Ask not what the smallholder farmers can do for insurance. Ask what insurance can do for smallholder farmers”  he added. 

Giving the people what they want, in the case of Mozambique and the wider Sub-Saharan Africa, means using bantu languages and the folklore tradition of ngano to tell stories of drought and other risks in a language and format that indigenous farmers can relate to. The importance of using language and messages that your target audience can relate to is at the heart of insurance education, said session moderator Camyla Fonseca, Knowledge and Capacity Building Coordinator at the ILO Social Finance Programme. “It goes beyond just awareness raising and knowledge – it’s more about creating financial capability than financial education. If consumers see value, then uptake will increase – but communications and materials are not always adapted to the needs and culture of the target audience.”

Click here to watch the ICII 2021 recording Session 9 in English.