In this presentation at the June 5-10, 2017 Global Learning and Evidence Exchange for Market Systems event in Dakar, Senegal, AMA Innovation Lab assistant director Tara Steinmetz discussed the benefits and challenges of using index insurance as a means of supporting small-scale farmers facing a range of climate-related threats.
In this presentation for the GAN Peer Learning Platform event on July 4, 2017 in Nairobi, Kenya, AMA Innovation Lab assistant director Tara Steinmetz discussed the potential for index insurance and development but also the importance of client value.
We show that existing constraints on take-up can partially be overcome using revised contract designs, advanced technology for better measurement, improved marketing, and better policy support.
This study uses economic approaches and the case of the index based livestock insurance (IBLI) product in Kenya to compare the quality of insurance products developed from a variety of satellite -based indices, all of which have either been proposed or are/have been used by insurance or insurance-like products in the region.
This paper incorporates asset insurance into a theoretical poverty trap model to assess the aggregate impact of insurance access on chronic and transitory poverty.
This study assesses both the demand for and the effectiveness of an innovative index insurance product designed to help smallholder farmers in Bangladesh manage risk to crop yields and the increased production costs associated with drought.
This paper estimates the general-equilibrium labor market effects of a large-scale randomized intervention in which we designed and marketed a rainfall index insurance product across three states in India.
This paper proposes and analyzes an alternative index insurance contract, which combines a satellite based index with the potential for a second-stage audit.
This paper shows that the transfer of gains from insurance across time can help explain low insurance demand, especially among the poor, with results from a randomized control trial on a crop insurance product in Kenya which removes it.
The objective of this paper is to investigate whether coupling agricultural loans with micro-level and meso-level drought index insurance can stimulate the demand and supply of credit and increase technology adoption.
This paper uses evidence-based understanding of poverty dynamics in the pastoralist-based economy of northern Kenya’s arid and semi arid lands as a case study to discuss and compare the observed impacts of two different social protection schemes on heterogeneous pastoralist households
This paper describes experimental insurance games with cotton farmers in Burkina Faso, finding that on average, farmer willingness to pay for insurance increases significantly when a premium rebate framing is used to render both costs and benefits of insurance as uncertain.
This paper describes a novel index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) product piloted among pastoralists in Northern Kenya, where insurance markets are effectively absent and uninsured risk exposure is a main cause of poverty.
This paper exploits a natural experiment wherein tens of thousands of microfinance borrowers across rural Haiti received a quasi-random value of insurance benefit in the aftermath of catastrophic hurricanes, and shows that greater insurance increased a beneficiary's demand for credit on the extensive margin, e.g. made formal lending relationships more durable.
Our results demonstrate that on average the sample population has a willingness to pay high enough to sustain a market viable insured loan product without subsidization with 56% of the target population expressing a willingness to pay for an insured loan at the market price.
This ILRI Research Brief describes the Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) product, piloted in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia since early 2010.
In this paper, we employ a dynamic, stochastic, heterogeneous agent model where farm households have access to contingent credit and make savings, technology and loan repayment choices.
This presentation took place at George Washington University, United States on November 6, 2014 describing how greater use of improved technologies could raise productivity and welfare in developing countries.
This presentation took place at George Washington University, United States on November 6, 2014 describing the adoption of improved seeds in Uganda and Senegal using index insurance.
This presentation took place at George Washington University, United States on November 6, 2014 describing how poor market integration in African markets result in barriers to building market linkages.
This presentation took place at George Washington University, United States on November 6, 2014 describing how behavioral lab experiments have uncovered a wealth of evidence contradictory to standard economic workhorse theories.
This presentation took place at George Washington University, United States on November 6, 2014 describing the research of essential heterogeneity measurements and constraining intervention in Mexico.
This presentation took place at George Washington University, United States on November 6, 2014 describing how crop yield index insurance in western Kenya.
This presentation took place at George Washington University, United States on November 6, 2014 describing the benefits of group index-insurance include averaging basis risk across spatially disbursed groups and reducing individual-level basis risks.
This presentation took place at George Washington University, United States on November 6, 2014 describing how information is costly and can lead to inefficient market outcomes.
In this paper, we present a novel way to understand the low uptake of index insurance using the interlinked concepts of ambiguity and compound lottery aversion.
This paper addresses the reasons for this current discrepancy between promise and reality. We conclude on perspectives for improvements in product design, complementary interventions to boost uptake, and strategies for sustainable scaling up of uptake.
This paper measures the impacts of perceived risk reduction and objective risk reduction at the individual level using two instrumental variable strategies. The results show that households who felt insured increased their area in cotton by more than 60%.
This paper steps back and considers theoretically where index insurance might be most effective, and whether it should be offered as a stand alone contract, or explicitly interlinked with credit contracts.
This presentation took place in Paris, France on June 25, 2014 describing the possibilities of using index insurance versus traditional responses to major drought shocks.
This presentation took place in Paris, France on June 25, 2014 and was presented by Alexandros Sarris describing a theoretical model for the willingness to pay for weather based index insurance.
This presentation took place in Paris, France on June 25, 2014 describing the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of an integrated social protection schemes.
This paper describes how a game was designed, how it was used in the field, and presents findings on how individuals played the game to introduce index based livestock insurance (IBLI).
This presentation took place in University of California Davis, United States describing joint liability creating tensions between cotton cooperatives and villages in Mali.
This presentation took place in University of California Davis, United States describing experimental games trying to better understand demand for incomplete insurance in Guatemala.
This presentation took place in University of California Davis, United States describing the general equilibrium in labor markets effecting the selling of insurance to the landed and the landless in India.
This presentation took place in University of California Davis, United States describing a three-year research project promoting smallholders to purchase index insurance contracts via coupled credit in Ghana.
This presentation took place in University of California Davis, United States describing how perfect forecasting is better than agricultural insurance.
This presentation took place at the Feed the Future Innovation Labs for Collaborative Research Regional Partners Meeting in Accra, Ghana on July 8-9, 2013 describing innovative projects addressing the three primary socioeconomic constraints.
This paper discusses an innovative index insurance contract the research team developed for Malian cotton producers, whose harvests are highly variable.
This paper considers poverty dynamics in a typical setting by calibrating the model to the northern Kenyan rangelands, where evidence of a poverty trap exists and pastoralists have the opportunity to insure livestock against drought losses.
This paper fleshes out observations of approaches to offering index insurance and proposes that the next generation of index insurance contracts be designed for development impact.
The paper explores the context and constraints to fertilizer use among smallholders in Ethiopia, and whether these constraints affect the demand for weather index insurance (WII), designed to insure the cost of input use.
This paper seeks to understand the structure of demand for rainfall index insurance in India by developing two approaches to estimating households’ valuation of rainfall insurance and evaluating them against an experiment in which fixed prices are randomly assigned.
This paper is a methodological exploration of research design for evaluating complex financial market interventions in the presence of low participation and program effect heterogeneity.
This study uses a randomized experiment to investigate 1) the role of crop-price risk in reducing demand for credit among farmers and 2) how risk mitigation changes farmers’ investment decisions.
L’article présent résume le travail réalisé par Michael Carter, Rachid Laajaj et Andres Moya avec l’aide de Catherine Guirkinger et Ombeline De Bock, qui ont envisagé deux types d’indices : l’indice climatique et l’indice basé sur les rendements moyens.
This paper, which is primary methodological, seeks to facilitate future efforts to accumulate knowledge and understanding of how index insurance works and whether or not it is likely to deliver on the promise of positive impacts on household welfare and efficiency of the rural economy.
This paper explores whether, when and how index insurance can enhance the functioning of agricultural credit markets and enhance farmers’ expected income even as it reduces the variance of income.
We explore how dynamic field experiments can help (i) intended beneficiaries learn and understand these complicated benefit streams and (ii) researchers better understand how the poor respond to risk when faced with nonlinear welfare dynamics.
This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a new index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) product designed to compensate for area average predicted livestock mortality loss in northern Kenya, where previous work has established the presence of poverty traps.
In this paper, we study the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product designed to compensate low-income Indian farmers in case of deficient rainfall during the primary monsoon season.
This paper describes the contract design and institutional features of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to smallholder farmers in rural India, and presents preliminary evidence on the determinants of insurance participation.
