For Jeremiah Kithaka, farming maize on his three acre farmland is the primary source of livelihood enabling him to provide for his family of four. However, with changing rainfall patterns, delayed starts to the rainy seasons and longer and more frequent dry periods, Jeremiah has seen vast volatility in his income levels over the past few years.

"Farming in Burkina can be very challenging. Uncertain weather conditions can have severely damaging impact on harvests and the ability of smallholder farmers to continue farming," says Sou Campaore, a 42-year old cotton farmer from Houndé, a farming village just outside Dedougou, a city in the western corridor of Burkina Faso. "Since the income from such an unpredictable harvest is not steady, we don’t get access to capital in order to implement more efficient farming practices and purchase better inputs. A bad season can also have a telling effect on the health and social position of

Satellite Technology and its continued advancement is critical to the relevance and accuracy of index insurance products as a counter against weather-related risks. The World Bank Group’s Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF) in partnership with its regional partners has been working with researchers and scientists to refine satellite technology for index insurance product design.

The development of sustainable index-insurance markets requires enabling legal and regulatory environments The adoption of the “CIMA Book VII” on April 5th 2012 was a major milestone allowing and regulating the development ofmicroinsurance and index-insurance for 15 countries in the Inter-African Conference on the Insurance Market or CIMA region In addition to this regional regulatory change, the Global Index-insurance Facility (GIIF) has supported national insurance supervision agencies with this transition. In particular, GIIF has assisted the Senegalese Insurance Supervision Agency with the

Full Publication Cotton is the major cash crop of Cameroon, however, even if it represents a quarter of agricultural exports it is only about six percent of total exports (Gergerly, 2009). The cotton society: SODECOTON (Soci´et´e de D´eveloppement du Coton du Cameroun) and the CMDT its Malian counterpart, are the only West African cotton societies that are still public monopsonies. Those parastatals are thus the only agent in the country to buy cot- ton from producers at pan-seasonally and -territorially fixed price (Delpeuch and Leblois, forthcoming). The national cotton producers

Source: ILO Impact Insurance Full publication In the Sudano-sahelian region, which includes Northern Cameroon, the inter-annual variability of the rainy season is high and irrigation is scarce. As a consequence, bad rainy seasons have a massive impact on crop yield and regularly entail food crises. Traditional insurances based on crop damage assessment are not available because of asymmetric information and high transaction costs compared to the value of production. Moreover the important spatial variability of the weather creates a room for pooling the impact of bad weather using index-based