insurance

This policy note by the Access to Insurance Initiative (A2ii) makes the case for agricultural insurance in the context of food security, explains the role of regulation to make effective risk protection work and highlights some of the challenges in regulating innovative index-based insurance approaches. »

This article, published in the Agricultural Systems journal, uses data from 500 households in Samburu County (Kenya) to explore how natural environment and market accessibility affect coping and adaptation strategies of pastoralists. In particular, the authors ask whether households accumulate livestock wealth and invest in structural and cognitive social capital to protect themselves against climate risks. »

This paper by the Inter-American Development Bank, analyzes in detail the market constraints on the development of the agricultural insurance market in Colombia and provides recommendations so that it can fulfill its potential as a risk management tool in the country. Insurance can potentially play an important role in climate change adaptation for rural households in developing countries as part of the overall climate change adaptation strategy. However, agricultural insurance markets have many market failures that inhibit their full development. »

This webinar by the Impact Insurance Facility looked at how governments can catalyse the development of agriculture insurance markets through a variety of interventions such as the provision, administration and management of subsidies, support for developing infrastructure for effective implementation of insurance programmes, investment in collection and sharing of data and customer education. »

Index based insurance is a promising innovation that might yet help scale up agricultural insurance to needed levels, as well as help underwrite many public relief programs. It also promises to be a useful bridge for increasing the engagement of private insurers in managing these risks, either directly or through various kinds of public-private or nonprofit-private partnerships. Yet despite many promising pilots, IBI has not yet taken off at scale. There are a number of challenges holding back IBI. »

This paper (PDF) by the Making Finance Work for Africa Partnership (MFW4A) examines the effect of financial innovation on poverty reduction in rural northern Nigeria. Households from this part of the world are farmers hence, exposed to the vagaries of Climate Change. Assessing whether or not the poorest income quintile (the poorest of the poor) benefit from existing financial inclusive strategies, would inform policy makers and direct the attention of microfinance entrepreneurs to better innovate products that would increase financial inclusiveness and reduce poverty in developing countries. »