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

We show theoretically that the presence of basis risk in index insurance makes it a complement to informal risk sharing, implying that index insurance crowds-in risk sharing and leading to a prediction that demand will be higher among groups of individuals that can share risk. We report results from Ethiopia from a first attempt to marketweather insurance to informal risk-sharing groups.

Full Publication In various forms microinsurance has been available to some low-income people in Africa for a number of years. Cooperative Insurers have serviced a market that spans the income ranges since the 1970s. In the 1980s, community-based health insurance schemes, especially in West Africa, followed the Bamako Initiative. In the mid-1990s, commercial insurers began to enter the market offering specialized microinsurance products. Informal microinsurance has been available for decades in a range of forms, from “tontines” in West Africa or “friend in need” groups in East Africa to burial