Sub-Saharan Africa

ILO Partners Centre For Insurance To Train Operators
The International Labour Organisation (ILO)'s Impact Insurance Facility together with the Centre for Insurance and Financial Management Studies in Nigeria will be organising a training course for insurance practitioners from October 21 to 23, 2015 in Lagos. It is also being organised with the support of the Global Index Insurance Facility and in partnership with the GIZ of Germany. The training Unlock the demand for your products: How to deliver what your clients see as value” builds on a variety of resources that the ILO has produced during its six years of supporting innovation and research
Insurance for Small Farms' Crops Takes Root
In a VOA article, the Kilimo Salama projected, funded by the Global Index Insurance Facility and the Syngenta Foundation, is cited for having provided insurance to about 200,000 farmers in east Africa, mainly in Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania. Because it is so expensive to verify losses on large numbers of small landholdings, the traditional type of individual loss-based insurance is not always viable. That has led to index-based insurance for smallholder farmers for weather-related risks. In the long run in the developing world, specialists say, what is needed most is investment in science and
Climate-linked Insurance a Boon for Poor Farmers
Poor farmers all over the world are increasingly falling prey to natural disasters, droughts and torrential rain largely due to climate change. But there is some good news as well. Thanks to new technologies, the widespread use of satellites, and more powerful computers, such events can largely be predicted in advance, thus making possible novel and more efficient insurance schemes for those at risk. In an interview with AFP, Gilles Galludec, Program Manager of the World Bank-run Global Index Insurance Facility discusses how index insurance schemes differ from traditional indemnity coverage in
Assessing Value from Index Insurance Products
The Joint GIIF-GAN Knowledge Sharing Forum “Assessing value from index insurance products” was organized by the Global Index Insurance Facility of the World Bank Group, USAID and Impact Insurance Facility of ILO in the morning of 16 September in Pacifica Headquarters in Paris. The client value of the cotton insurance project in Burkina Faso, implemented by PlaNet Guarantee, was assessed using 2 methodologies based on a double trigger approach. The scheme works on the average yield approach of the Group of Cotton Producers (GCP) and the yield of the neighbouring GCP in order to avoid all
Innovative Microinsurance Protects Poor Farmers Against Climate Change
For several years, insuring harvests against the climate hazards that regularly destroy farmers’ crops in developing countries has for several years been a major tool in the fight against poverty, mainly in Africa and Asia, where between 400 and 500 million farmers survive on very low incomes. At the Convergences World Forum in Paris on 9 September 2015, Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture and GIIF speak about the innovations in index insurance and the success of the Kilimo Salama project in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania. Expanded in 2014, the program develops and offers insurance for
MicroEnsure – Providing Cover for the Under-insured Mass Markets in Africa
Peter Gross, Regional Director in Africa with MicroEnsure, talks to Bank Innovation online magazine about how MicroEnsure is providing micro-insurance to 15 million people in 17 countries in Africa and Asia. He explains that the reason for the poor uptake of insurance in these mass market economies can be boiled down to 4 factors: cost, trust (or lack of it), access (or lack of it), and understading (or lack of it). Click here to read the full interview.
03
Feb
Key findings from the Global expert workshop co-hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netherlands and the Rabobank Group and organized by the World Bank’s FISF initiative. Workshop report including links to presentations made at the workshop is available here: Report on Financial Inclusion of Agriculture-Dependent Households Need to focus on broader array of financial services rather than just credit or insurance for agricultural production. Agricultural households have a broad range of financial service needs, several of them for lifecycle and business needs not related to agriculture
19
Jan
This post was originally produced during the GIIF Conference held in Paris at the OECD Headquarters. The 6 key lessons learnt that emerge from the panel are as follows: Insurance needs to be part of a value add package that generates higher income for the farmers Governments play a key role in creating markets for agricultural insurance. Experiences in Peru, India and Senegal point to government interventions such as premium support, risk financing, and linkage to credit. There is a need to design and offer the right insurance product. Area Yield Index Insurance may offer an adequate
New Trends in Agricultual Finance
Agricultural finance is crucial to support the growth of the agricultural sector. Indeed, it is essential for food security, job creation, and overall economic growth. This synthesis report presents a summary of research studies on five key areas of agricultural finance innovation prepared under the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI), as well as the presentations and discussions of these study findings during the “G20 Roundtable on Innovations in Agricultural Finance” convened on September 9, 2015 in Antalya, Turkey by the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Finance Sub-Group
24
Nov
Interview with Xavier Gine, Lead Economist within the World Bank Research Department (DEC). 1/ What do we know about index insurance after about 10 years of experience? There has been a lot of research around the question of take-up and impact of index insurance. Despite the potentially large welfare benefits, voluntary take-up of index insurance products has been rather limited so far. Explanations for this low demand could include: The first reason is that the product may be expensive, relative to the existing risk coping strategies. After all, when it is not subsidized as is the case for