2016 Global Action Network on Agriculture Insurance Working Group Meeting Highlights

The Global Action Network (GAN) on Agriculture Insurance is a community of experts and practitioners formed in November 2014 by the ILO’s Impact Insurance Facility with support of USAID and the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Assets and Market Access Index Insurance Innovation Initiative (I4) at UC Davis.

It provides a forum for thought leaders in agriculture insurance to discuss key issues, identify constraints, explore solutions and undertake evaluation and research. It also provides a venue to explore synergies on agriculture insurance projects, and promote lessons learned, best practices and quality standards on insurance market development to the insurance and broader development communities.

Since the first working group meetings in London in April 2015, the three working groups have created tools and guidelines for responsible scaling of agriculture insurance, namely: 

  • A tool for assessing the client value of index insurance products (Working Group 1);
  • A concept note on public risk reinsurance (Working Group 2);
  • Guidelines on bundling agriculture insurance with financial and non-financial services (Working Group 3); and
  • Guidelines on consumer education for index insurance (Working Group 3). 

During the Geneva meetings, the draft outputs of these tools and guidelines were presented to the broader GAN membership for feedback and application. To prepare for the two days of discussions, the ILO’s Impact Insurance Facility contacted core Working Group members to define the format of the sessions and shared the draft output versions with all participants. 

Meeting objectives  

  • To gather feedback on the work of the three working groups on client value assessment, bundling, and consumer education; and to explore possibilities of applying the tools and guidelines they had developed
  • To brainstorm how to operationalize a public risk reinsurance facility and encourage more government involvement in agriculture insurance
  • To agree on next steps for the working groups
  • To disseminate the work of the GAN to a broader audience through a half-day public symposium