Microinsurance

We’ve covered a lot of the news regarding the growth of microinsurance in the Philippines, particularly microinsurance for weather and disaster cover pilots, and the Asian country seems to be continuing to adopt insurance for low-income people quicker than many other countries.

The China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) is encouraging insurers to trial methods to extend agricultural insurance cover to include greater protection against weather related insurance losses in the country. There has been a lot of discussion of the importance of food security recently and China, with its climate and huge population, is particularly exposed.

French NGO PlaNet Guarantee have teamed up with the International Finance Corporation insurance facility the Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF) to launch what they are calling the first regional management platform for microinsurance and index insurance in West Africa.

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 […]