An audit rule that is activated when farmers believe an index has failed can serve as a fail-safe mechanism to ensure the insurance contract provides the intended protection.
MRR's Village Insurance Savings Accounts (VISA) model offers multiple benefits for increasing farmer uptake of insurance. The model's design builds inclusion, understanding, affordability among users, and lower costs for the provider.
This book outlines the origins and evolution of index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) and discusses the economics of poverty, risk management, and drylands development, as well as the value and challenges of integrating research with operational implementation to tackle development and humanitarian challenges.
Lab-in-the-field experiments in Ghana found that participants were less likely to share risk, and more likely to select insurance, when their wealth was unequal. The findings raise the prospect that addressing inequality could have spillover effects for poverty reduction and resilience.
A Contingent Line of Credit (CLOC) is a new financial instrument tailor-made for microfinance institutions and their smallholder clients and a powerful addition to a portfolio that charts a future of business growth.
Rigorous field trials across Africa show that agricultural index insurance can stabilize small-scale farmers financially after a shock and even increase their agricultural investments, both of which could improve productivity and profitability in the West African cotton value chain.
This paper results reports from a RCT in Mozambique and Tanzania that bundled stress-tolerant maize seeds with index insurance for a seed-replacement guarantee. The analysis shows that farmers who experienced shocks and saw both technologies in action subsequently increased their agricultural investments, allowing farmers to return to return to their pre-shock positions and even to move toward higher expected incomes.
This study from Ghana investigates the willingness to pay (WTP) for index-based drought insurance coupled with agricultural loans by product design and gender, using a contingent valuation method.
This MRR Discussion Paper summarizes the current state of evidence on microinsurance, contingent credit, stress-tolerant seeds and other risk-management instruments that create new ways for small-scale agricultural households to manage weather-related risks.
