The Ugandan fintech startup Emata has successfully secured $2.4 million in seed funding , earmarked for the expansion of its digital agricultural loan services across East Africa, with a primary focus on Uganda and potential growth into Tanzania. Emata specializes in providing automated loans to smallholder farmers, effectively addressing the significant agricultural financing gap within the region by offering loans at rates five times more affordable than informal lending alternatives. The company has developed a digital platform that streamlines the lending process and is deeply integrated...

In 2022, despite the ongoing struggles of the COVID-19 pandemic, the GIIF Program successfully delivered significant results and continued building a strong pipeline to strengthen its ties with clients, other WBG projects and the donor community. All activities, projects, events, trainings, studies focus on further developing the markets. Since the launch of GIIF, more than 13 million agriculture insurance policies have been issued cumulatively, with an estimated outreach of 65 million beneficiaries globally. In these difficult conditions, as the GIIF team we would like to emphasize that we...

Financial inclusion is critical to development in Africa. Yet, many smallholder farmers and micro, small & medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs ) on the continent have limited access to financial products, including climate-resilient microinsurance and other insurance services. Past December 2022, IFC - International Finance Corporation convened representatives from Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to discuss building the capacity of companies and regulators to design agricultural insurance products and best practices for assessing the insurance value of smallholder...

As part of the latest International Conference on Inclusive Insurance (ICII) with around 1000 participants from over 120 countries discussing how to make insurance more inclusive, and during Day 3 when attendees where discussing the Challenges of Reaching the Client, the Director of Hollard Mozambique ( Israel Muchena ) brought up important lessons learned from successful education programs, mentioning the Ngano of Lazy Hare and the Drought story developed for awareness of insurance based on traditional Mozambican tale. In the introduction to risk through an ancient African oral story (Ngano...