Using a multi-year randomised controlled trial in Tanzania and Mozambique, this paper
explores whether a complementary bundle of genetic and financial technologies can boost the resilience and productivity of small-scale farmers. The analysis shows that treatment-group farmers who experienced shocks and saw the technologies in action subsequently increased their agricultural investment beyond pre-shock levels.
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 article investigates the impact of insurance backed contingent credit on demand for credit and investment decisions using a framed field experiment conducted in rural Tanzania.
This paper asks whether a hybrid contract, which combines joint liability with an individual collateral requirement, could resolve tradeoffs between collateralized individual loans that exclude those who lack the requisite collateral assets or are unwilling to put them at risk and joint liability loans that are subject to moral hazard and freeriding.
This paper demonstrates that a contract based on satellite data combined with a second-stage conditional audit has the potential to improve index insurance quality.
While index insurance offers a compelling solution to the problem of covariant risk among smallholder farmers in developing countries, most weather based contracts suffer from poor quality due to a low correlation between the index and farmer losses. This paper proposes and analyzes an alternative index insurance contract, which combines a satellite based index with the potential for a second-stage audit.