In 2011 The World Bank Group launched a feasibility study on developing an Index Insurance pilot in Uruguay, funded by the Government of Japan through the Global Index Insurance Facility. The study quantified the total number of reproductive livestock units as 3.8 million countrywide, with 315 million USD total sum insured. The corresponding number of livestock producers was estimated at 38,000. The outputs of this technical and financial assistance has allowed the Government of Uruguay to start pilot testing an innovative Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) index insurance to cover...

In june 2016, over 60 participants gathered at the College of insurance in Nairobi to discuss best practices and share their knowledge and expertise on index insurance, particularly livestock insurance and agriculture insurance. The discussions were quite timely, as the Government of Kenya recently allocated US$6 million for crop and livestock insurance for smallholder producers for next year, as one of the ‘key government flagship projects to drive the transformative agenda’. This is a five-fold increase in budget from the previous years with strong allocations toward data systems and...

Agricultural finance is crucial to support the growth of the agricultural sector. Indeed, it is essential for food security, job creation, and overall economic growth. This synthesis report presents a summary of research studies on five key areas of agricultural finance innovation prepared under the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI), as well as the presentations and discussions of these study findings during the “G20 Roundtable on Innovations in Agricultural Finance” convened on September 9, 2015 in Antalya, Turkey by the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Finance Sub-Group...

Agricultural production is inherently subject to a variety of risks because management decisions or states-of-nature often generate future outcomes (either favorable or unfavorable) that cannot be predicted with certainty. The variability of these outcomes represents risk. Risk is frequently measured in terms of the probability of various outcomes. Agricultural producers face a variety of risks including production (yield), output price, and input price risk. Some of these risks are managed through production and fi nancial decision-making, while others are simply accepted as costs of doing...