drought

An project called Food Early Solutions for Africa (FESA) has been working on validating a microinsurance product for African farmers which will use satellite technology to measure drought conditions. This allows them to create an index against which a microinsurance drought product can be triggered.

Parts of Russia are currently suffering from their worst drought conditions for years with some areas not having had any rain since April. This extreme dry season has occurred after the most severe winter suffered by Russia in many years which destroyed winter crops. So Russian farmers are having a particularly bad time of it […]

Russian newspapers are reporting that their government has been discussing plans to save the country’s agricultural industry from drought risks. The Russian government want to shift the burden of agricultural weather risk to the private sector and insurers in particular.

Vortex Insurance Agency, LLC, a subsidiary of MSI GuaranteedWeather, have announced a new product to help any businesses that depend on green pasture to hedge the risk that drought poses to their bottom line. The new product is index-based and utilises a rainfall index. Here’s the full press release from Vortex.

Sompo Japan have released a press release to announce the launch of a new insurance product in Thailand to protect against drought. It’s good to see further advances in the weather index based insurance world as they expand to new regions. Although this is again a micro-insurance pilot scheme it’s hoped this could continue as […]

Sometimes new products appear on the market which are both innovative and interesting to us here at Artemis. This one is particularly interesting as it utilises satellites to assess pasture greenness to create an index against which insurance products can be triggered.

MicroEnsure has been running a weather insurance pilot in Malawi, Africa since 2005 with the World Bank’s help and approval. Since then they have launched the product to farmers in Tanzania, Rwanda, India and the Philippines. Now they have announced that they will be opening up and offering policies to farmers in Kenya by the […]

Here’s an interesting video interview with Eric Seuret of a technology company called 3S Mobile. As you might guess they provide mobile software and mobile internet related services. They are providing the technology behind an interesting use of SMS (text messaging) to enable Kenyan small holder farmers to gain access to micro-finance weather insurance protection. […]