Panos Varangis, the World Bank Group's Global Lead for agricultural finance and agricultural insurance in the Finance and Markets Global Practice, was speaking at a World Bank event on index insurance in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic's Diario Libre reports. To an audience, Mr. Varangis was presenting index insurance as an alternative financial instrument that can protect agricultural producers in Dominican Republic from hurricanes, tropical storms, and floods. The country loses an average of US $450 million a year since 1961 by events associated with these types of disasters. Dominican

Subsistence farmers are often among the world’s most poor and they will need access to financial products if they are to adapt to climate change and the extreme drought, floods and storms it brings, said Her Majesty Queen Máxima of the Netherlands during the 4th International Climate Change Adaptation Conference in Rotterdam on May 11, 2016. Her Majesty believes that financial services that are more inclusive and insurance innovations, such as index insurance, help reduce many smallholder farmers' vulnerability and increase their ability to escape poverty, and also cites the the Kilimo Salama

In an article entitled “Index insurance: What you need to know”, Devex interviews Gloria Grandolini, the WBG’s Senior Director, and Gilles Galludec, GIIF Program Manager, on the Global Index Insurance Facility and how index insurance works. To help encourage the spread of index insurance as a risk management tool, GIIF is working with regional partners in developing countries, primarily sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific. Over 1 million small farmers, pastoralists and small businesses have signed on — with over $130 million in sums insured. Click here to read

The World Bank has welcomed the government's partnership with local insurance companies in crop and livestock cover policies, saying they will benefit smallholder farmers.Country director for Kenya, Ms Diarietou Gaye, said the programme has the potential to positively impact the country's economic development since it will help increase production as well as producer incomes."The large majority of the poor in Kenya are farmers and it will enable them to adopt improved production processes to help break the poverty cycle of low investment and low returns," she said.The bank's Disaster Risk

NAIROBI, March 12, 2016- The Government of Kenya today launched the Kenya National Agricultural Insurance Program, which is designed to address the challenges that agricultural producers face when there are large production shocks, such as droughts and floods. The program, which is designed as a partnership between the government and the private sector, was developed with assistance from the World Bank Group and builds on the experience of similar programs in Mexico, India, and China. One program line will focus on livestock insurance, while another will focus on maize and wheat insurance.

Mr. Tanguy Touffut of AXA Corporate Solutions discusses the benefits of parametric insurance, which he sees as a promising solution for farmers and other weather-sensitive industries against climate-change effects. It is nothing new: climate change, a phenomenon in full effect, has many drastic consequences of all types for people, companies, and entire economies alike. It has been observed that weather extremes are increasing as a consequence of climate change. In January 2015, AXA Corporate Solutions entered into a partnership with the World Bank’s Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF). The

In a VOA article, the Kilimo Salama projected, funded by the Global Index Insurance Facility and the Syngenta Foundation, is cited for having provided insurance to about 200,000 farmers in east Africa, mainly in Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania. Because it is so expensive to verify losses on large numbers of small landholdings, the traditional type of individual loss-based insurance is not always viable. That has led to index-based insurance for smallholder farmers for weather-related risks. In the long run in the developing world, specialists say, what is needed most is investment in science and

The International Labour Organisation (ILO)'s Impact Insurance Facility together with the Centre for Insurance and Financial Management Studies in Nigeria will be organising a training course for insurance practitioners from October 21 to 23, 2015 in Lagos. It is also being organised with the support of the Global Index Insurance Facility and in partnership with the GIZ of Germany. The training Unlock the demand for your products: How to deliver what your clients see as value” builds on a variety of resources that the ILO has produced during its six years of supporting innovation and research

Poor farmers all over the world are increasingly falling prey to natural disasters, droughts and torrential rain largely due to climate change. But there is some good news as well. Thanks to new technologies, the widespread use of satellites, and more powerful computers, such events can largely be predicted in advance, thus making possible novel and more efficient insurance schemes for those at risk. In an interview with AFP, Gilles Galludec, Program Manager of the World Bank-run Global Index Insurance Facility discusses how index insurance schemes differ from traditional indemnity coverage in

The Joint GIIF-GAN Knowledge Sharing Forum “Assessing value from index insurance products” was organized by the Global Index Insurance Facility of the World Bank Group, USAID and Impact Insurance Facility of ILO in the morning of 16 September in Pacifica Headquarters in Paris. The client value of the cotton insurance project in Burkina Faso, implemented by PlaNet Guarantee, was assessed using 2 methodologies based on a double trigger approach. The scheme works on the average yield approach of the Group of Cotton Producers (GCP) and the yield of the neighbouring GCP in order to avoid all