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

What happens when a major national development organization – GIZ and a leading private insurer – Allianz SE get together to build innovation in micro-insurance? Watch full video of the event here Experts presented key insights on micro-insurance with a larger view on how these lessons learnt can be applied to other inclusive insurance projects and to various other sectors. The 60 minute session showcased case-studies ranging from how GIZ has assisted Allianz in turning a corporate responsibility charitable micro-insurance story into a fully-fledged and profitable micro-insurance business

Last week, the United Nations’s Secretary General - Ban Ki-Moon, welcomed over 200 insurance representatives at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York for the 17-June UN Insurance Forum. During his inspiring speech, Ban Ki-Moon remarked that this was the first time that a UN Secretary General has ever met a congregation of global insurance leaders. He stressed that this was by no means a chance encounter and called upon the insurance industry to play a strong role in the quest for a more sustainable post-2015 world. He stressed that insurers should invest wisely into sustainable

SEPTEMBER 14 and 15, OECD Headquarters, PARIS Climate risk and its impact has been an issue of key significance for the insurance industry. Risks are outlined for all eco-systems, societies, economies, industries and agriculture. Is Index Insurance the Solution? Index insurance is an innovative financial instrument to help poor smallholder farmers manage the increasing climate risks to their harvests. Index insurance will allow farmers to survive adverse weather or destroyed harvests and potentially open up agri-credit markets; enabling farmers to protect their assets and invest in their farms

Can you give us some examples of key trade-offs that you have faced when providing technical support to the overarching policy discussion on regulation of index insurance in Kenya? The first trade-off that we have faced was in the definition of insurable interest. In the law of insurance, the insured must have an interest in the subject matter of his or her policy, or such policy will be regarded as a form of gambling. However, in Kenya most farmers do not own their land as they work on communal farms or as wage laborers. We therefore decided in our policy framework to define the insurable

What do you think of the upcoming index insurance regulation in Kenya? Well, at this stage, I think we have drafted a policy paper which sets guidelines for the future regulations , however I believe that we have here an opportunity to enhance access to insurance in Kenya. What are the expected benefits? One of the key expected benefits is the creation of a consumer protection framework. This means that index insurance products will need to be explained very clearly and in a simple way, and all the contract terms (ex: triggers, reference weather stations, index design etc...) will have to be

Bénin " L’assurance pour le champ, on se demande si c’est une vérité. Maintenant, c’est une réalité pour moi!” Premières indemnisations dans le cadre du projet GIIF d’assurance indicielle pour les producteurs de maïs du Benin “L’assurance pour le champ, on se demande si c’est une vérité. Maintenant, c’est une réalité pour moi!” . C’est avec grand enthousiasme que Bessekourou Issiaka, producteur de maïs de 38 ans du Nord du Benin, a reçu ses premières indemnisations sur sa police d’assurance indicielle. A cause de la faible pluviométrie de cette année, les rendements de certaines de ses

“ I did not believe in crop insurance before, but now it is a reality for me”! It is with great enthusiasm that 38-year old maize farmer Bessekourou Issiaka from Northern Benin received the first payout on his weather insurance policy. Because of the lack of rain this season, some of his maize fields generated less than half of their usual yield, or 800 kg/ha instead of the usual 2000 kg/ha. He is therefore quite relieved to receive FCFA 90,000, about 180 dollar insurance payout which will help him repay the loan he took to purchase inputs for the maize production. Bessekourou Issiaka is one

This map was created using data on rural loans. The GIS analysis shows where the density of loan amounts is higher (as opposed to where there are more individual loans). It is meant to highlight where the larger loans are concentrated. Notice that there are areas with many individual loans and low amount density. The methodology used to draw the map is as follows: The banks provided portfolio data with x/y coordinates in WGS84 format, which where projected and added to a basemap. Using the “point density” geographic analysis under the spatial analyst in ArcGIS 10.3, we derived a density of

Insurers are trying to control costs and reach scale in agriculture insurance by designing meso-level insurance policies that cover large numbers of farmers associated with an aggregator (e.g. agribusiness firm, financial institution, input providers). Products are priced using a portfolio pricing model, meaning that the price is calculated on the basis of the whole group. This avoids the cost of assessing individual plots.A project in Mozambique supported by GIIF and implemented by reinsurance broker, Guy Carpenter, used a meso-level approach to cover cotton farmers through a public-private