Microinsurance news

Bloomberg reports that Holcim, the second largest cement producer in the world, is going to offer catastrophe microinsurance to customers in developing countries and emerging markets as an additional sales tool giving them a way to mitigate some of the risks of constructing homes in catastrophe prone countries.

A number of high profile organisations within the risk transfer and reinsurance industries have teamed up to help bring affordable catastrophe insurance to the Caribbean island of Haiti. The innovative, donor-capitalised insurance facility called the Microinsurance Catastrophe Risk Organisation (MiCRO), has been set up to target the country’s ‘informal sector’ – the organized poor who […]

Nigeria are the latest country we’ve heard of which has a desire to establish a scheme to help its farmers protect their livelihoods from the vagaries of the weather and changing climate patterns. Only 1% of farmers in Nigeria have access to insurance cover, this despite the fact that 90% of Nigeria’s agriculture is said […]

Guy Carpenter has announced that they have received a $1m grant from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to help develop a market for weather index-based microinsurance products in Mozambique. The initiative will aim to provide cheap, affordable insurance cover for farmers in a country where the population depends on agriculture for economic subsistence.

With farmers in Kenya increasingly fearing large weather-related losses to their crops and livestock, and the access to weather data and infrastructure improving, the Kilimo Salama crop weather insurance program launched by UAP Insurance, Syngenta Foundation and mobile operator Safaricom is going to expand in scope and availability.

As many as eighty cooperatives in the Philippines are said to be considering a microinsurance product (our previous coverage here) designed to protect them from the impact to their loan portfolios caused by natural disasters and extreme weather involving wind and rainfall.

It seems that microinsurance, at least in some areas of the world, is now prevalent enough and that after a disaster strikes insurers are seeing large increases in applications for microinsurance policies to protect locals from any future events. This suggests that the marketing efforts which have been ongoing in this sector are beginning to […]

We’ve been following the development of the microinsurance market for weather index insurance with great interest at Artemis. As a product it seems perfect for developing nations as it is easily understood and gives predictable payouts based on actual weather conditions. Weather index insurance has received the backing of organisations such as the World Bank […]

Egypt is just emerging from a two week period of unrest and revolution. It’s still unclear which direction the country will head in now that its government has been torn apart and replaced by the heads of the army but it does look like a new form of Middle Eastern democracy could emerge and insurers […]

There has always been a need for the public and private sectors to come together to provide effective disaster and catastrophe risk transfer solutions. The private sector alone, in the form of insurance and reinsurance, cannot provide the capacity to cover all of the risk or effectively help the poorest of people especially in developing […]