This MRR Concept Note builds out how blended indexed financial tools work in practice, providing additional guidance on how each indexed tool works in good and bad years, as well as how a long-term package can change over time to meet farmers' needs.
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 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.
National governments can pre-finance support with disaster risk insurance, but there has been no objective way to determine whether it is more effective than paying the costs as they arise. New research has found a way to evaluate risk insurance and to build a metric for improving contract design.
Small-scale farmers often don't adopt technologies that build resilience, like stress-tolerant seeds and index insurance, because they don't provide benefits in every year. New research shows how to maximize learning with these technologies to quickly build lasting adoption and long-term resilience in rural communities.
In Ghana, insured loans increased farmers' likelihood of receiving credit by between 15 and 21 percentage points. There was no impact on the likelihood that farmers apply for credit but there was an increase in the likelihood of loan approvals of between 17 and 25 percentage points.
This paper summarizes the current state of evidence on index insurance for disaster risk and development including its impacts in the field, remaining challenges and opportunities, research gaps, and the knowledge frontier today.
This study shows that formal insurance uptake has no significant effect on pastoralists' willingness to share risk through customary institutions. Overall, the results imply that index insurance did not crowd out informal risk-sharing mediated by social networks.
This project is testing the complexity and utility components of a hypothetical agriculture revenue insurance offering that would insure smallholder farmers against both weather and price shocks.