In a CGAP blog, Lisa Morgan and Craig Churchill wrote that financial inclusion can and should play a critical role in boosting a nation’s health and well-being. But with savings and credit alone, it is difficult to cope with catastrophic losses, which really should be covered by insurance, ideally through a universal health coverage scheme as stipulated by the UN's Sustaianble Development Goal (SDG). Together savings, credit, and insurance can be a powerful poverty fighting triad. Given today’s digital advances, there are more opportunities than ever for financial inclusion find smarter ways...

Vanessa Meadu at University of Copenhagen's CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) has created a colorful, comprehensive infographic that explains how index insurance could help millions of smallholder farmers fight back against climate change. For more information about the CGIAR and CCAFS, please visit their Linkedin Group at https://www.linkedin.com/company/cgiar-climate. More great presentations like this one can also be found at http://www.slideshare.net/cgiarclimate/ccafs-index-insurance-infographic-final.

The risk of drought is one of the biggest threats to livestock production in Uruguay. This is particularly relevant in livestock breeding bases, as the quality of the available pasture directly affects the quality of the livestock, and livestock fertility takes years to recover from bad droughts. In 2011 The World Bank Group (WBG) launched a feasibility study on developing an Index Insurance pilot in Uruguay, funded by the Government of Japan through the Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF). The study quantified the total number of reproductive livestock units as 3.8 million countrywide,...

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...

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...

Albert Einstein once remarked "if I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it." Good advice, but unfortunately all too often forgotten. The British post office (Royal Mail) at one point tried to improve its next-day delivery rate from 98 to 99%, in an attempt to improve customer perception of its services. The effort nearly broke the organization, while it would have taken much less effort and resources to simply tell the UK public about the post office's current performance -- surveys showed people thought it was...

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...

Previously published here on the World Bank Group's Private Sector Development Blog How governments can ensure that low-income farmers are financially protected against natural disasters, such as droughts, was at the heart of a panel discussion at the “ Global Index Insurance Conference ,” which concluded earlier this week in Paris. The panelists explored various options, such as the disaster reserve fund FONDEN in Mexico as well as three index-based insurance programs aiming to protect vulnerable farmers: the African Risk Capacity , the Kenya Livestock Insurance Program, and the Mexican...

The Global Index Insurance Facility together with the ILO's Impact Insurance Facility, USAID and BASIS/I4-sponsored Global Action Network (GAN), organised a webinar to look into the question "How can index insurance be bundled with other financial and non financial services". This webinar featured speakers from global organizations who shared experiences and discussed which services and activities in the agriculture value chain are most aligned for bundling. It explored mechanisms and issues in bundling, and also looked into the possible impact of bundling on pricing & off-take of index...

Having many Sri Lankan friends in my home country of Australia, I have always wanted to visit Sri Lanka. The image of beautiful green tea plantations comes to mind, and perhaps rightfully so. This May, I had the opportunity to visit and understand more about their Index Insurance market through the Index Insurance Forum – a community of practitioners working towards market development and scalability in Index Insurance. The visit was part of a peer exchange with SANASA , an insurance company in Sri Lanka and a partner of the World Bank Group’s Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF). The...