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With each passing year, the risks of unabated climate change are mounting. Climate change will not only make it more difficult to feed the projected 10 billion people by 2050, but its impact is already being felt in the form of reduced yields and more frequent extreme weather events that affect crops and livestock. Providing risk mitigation solutions such as agriculture insurance for the farming community to be able to face the impacts of natural disasters is, therefore, significant. More than 30 participants from eleven countries from across Africa, Asia and Europe gathered in Colombo, Sri...
18
Sep
How would you describe the international landscape of initiatives to help smallholders manage their risks? How is the emerging market structured and who are the innovators? What have they learned so far, current constraints and future opportunities? What insurance, financing, and other risk mitigation products and services are already available? Which gaps need to be filled, and how? These and related questions are the subjects of a global study by the Initiative for Smallholder Finance (ISF). Commissioned by the Syngenta Foundation, the study began in March. Its results will form a...
17
Jul
Smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa are some of the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and adverse weather events. Weather-based index insurance can help farmers become more resilient by giving them a tool to manage their risk, protect their investment, and maintain their livelihood. But the insurance industry in the region has been slow to develop these products, mostly because they lack the necessary technical skills and capacity; high-level training helps develop these skills to create new and innovative index-based insurance products in the regional market, which in...
The World Bank Group has approved additional $14.6m IDA (loan and grant) financing for the Strengthening Climate Resilience (PPCR Phase II) Project that will help strengthen Zambia’s institutional framework for climate resilience and improve the adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities in the Barotse sub-basin of the Zambezi. The project is also expected to help integrate financial and technical services such as savings, micro-credit, and index insurance into the existing approaches to sustainable agriculture and climate resilience.
On May 22-24, 2018, the IFC Eastern Europe and Central Asia Agri-Finance Project held a 3-day seminar titled “Basic principles of development of index insurance products" for the insurance market of Ukraine. The seminar was a continuation of work started in summer of 2017 that aimed at developing local skills for index insurance and, once again, was led by Shadreck Mapfumo, GIIF Senior Financial Sector Specialist. Mr. Mapfumo and the participants deep dived into the fundamentals of index product modeling based on real data and modern actuarial models. The event was organized with the support...
(C) Katharina Nett / GIZ
22
Jun
From April 17 to 20, the Strategic Alliance on Climate Risk Transfer Solutions facilitated two high-level executive training on index-based livestock insurance in Mombasa, Kenya. The goal was to reflect on the Kenya Livestock Insurance Program (KLIP) – a flagship program in agricultural insurance – and define next steps for further improvement and implementation on national and county level. The World Bank and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) are also involved in the Program and the gained knowledge is openly shared for other programs and countries to use. The...

Introduction to GIIF and Index Insurance

Index insurance is an innovative approach to insurance provision that pays out benefits based on a pre-determined index or loss of assets and investments resulting from weather and catastrophic events, without requiring the traditional services of insurance claims assessors. It also allows for the claims settlement process to be quicker and more objective.
On January 19, 2018, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the World Bank organized a workshop in Abidjan to present the results of a feasibility study on index-based agricultural insurance conducted in Côte d’Ivoire between the months of May and September 2017 by the Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF). As part of the World Bank Group’s Climate Finance and Risk Management unit, GIIF facilitates access to finance for smallholder farmers, micro-entrepreneurs, and microfinance institutions through the provisions of catastrophic risk transfer solutions and index-based insurance in...

GIIF Capacity Building in West Africa (French)

In December 2017, participants from various African Francophone nations attended a regional workshop held in Saly, Senegal, to learn about index insurance fundamentals and risk transfer process as well as to discuss and apply the use of agro-climactic data to the design of index insurance products. GIIF staff and participants discuss the importance of capacity training on index insurance in this video.
There has been an increase in projects in sub-Saharan Africa to develop index insurance that helps farmers build resilience against climate change, EURACTIV.fr reports . Currently, dozens of projects are led by the World Bank to develop this type of insurance. In West Africa, initiatives are coordinated by GIIF's partner, PlaNet guarantee, in Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal. Anne Durez, head of marketing at PlaNet guarantee, index insurance follows a double objective: “stabilizing farmers’ incomes and allowing them to finance their activities.”
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