Decades of research have documented the high costs of uninsured risks for smallholder agricultural and pastoralist households. Risk makes people poor, leading them to shy away from high-return but high-risk opportunities. Risk keeps people poor when it leads them to pursue defensive savings strategies that cut off pathways out of poverty.

Index insurance has proven a financial tool to transfer debilitating risk our of low-income rural households. These results have garnered significant attention at the highest policy levels, though many barriers and technical challenges remain to realizing the full potential of index insurance and responsibly scaling it up.

With support from a USAID Associate Award "G8 Enabling Action on Risk: Advancing Index Insurance," the AMA Innovation Lab is collaborating with the International Labour Organization's Impact Insurance Facility and global partners to guide this political momentum towards responsible and reliable index insurance solutions, and to close the gap that often exists between knowledge generation and large-scale projects. The primary activities of the Global Action Network are:

• Establish and coordinate a community of experts that will serve as a global network that discusses key issues around agricultural insurance.
• Build capacity of practitioners and governments in focus countries; develop and conduct training for practitioners to create an enabling environment for agricultural insurance.
• Promote responsible scaling of agricultural insurance to the broader insurance community; repackaging & disseminating lessons into knowledge products, tools, and training modules.
• Identify remaining knowledge gaps on index insurance and work commission needed research and pilot activities.
• Contribute to the design, implementation and evaluation of large-scale index insurance programs.