The soil that Abdoulaye Ndiaye holds in his hand is dry and dusty. A little further away in the Kaolack region the groundnut plants are already beginning to spring up in the fields, but in Paskoto village Abdoulaye and his fellow farmers have not seen a drop so far this season. "The most important challenge for us is the weather. It is God who decides. We have no choice, but are just left looking for ways to handle the situation," Abdoulaye says, now using his hand to shield his eyes against the stark sunlight.

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.

This study explores the feasibility of weather index insurance (WII) in providing cost-effective ways for rural dwellers to manage risk and better cope with catastrophic events. The case study analyzed is drought coverage for maize production risk in Eastern Indonesia. Indonesia is considered one of the more vulnerable countries to hydro-meteorological risks in Asia. In some agricultural areas, harvest and production dip significantly during ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) events due to belownormal rainfall. Indonesian production is highly dependent upon rainfall. Only 17 percent of 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

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.