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 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.
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.
A temporary subsidy for maize farmers in Mozambique stimulated Green Revolution technology adoption and led to increased maize yields. Social networks of subsidized farmers benefit from spillovers, experiencing increases in technology adoption, yields and beliefs about the returns to the technologies.
This paper's model of consumption and asset accumulation shows that a hybrid social protection policy, which devotes resources to funding “state of the world contingent transfers” (SWCTs) to vulnerable, but non-poor households in the wake of negative shocks, can result in lower rates of poverty in the medium term than does a conventional cash transfer policy.
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.
This presentation describes the need for an objective minimum quality standard for index insurance to ensure that contracts don't leave farmers worse off for having purchased them, as well as a clear definition of index insurance quality.
This paper builds a multi-generation household model of consumption, accumulation, and risk management to assess the dynamic consequences of climate risk exposure. The analysis shows the long-term level and depth of poverty can be improved by incorporating ‘vulnerability-targeted social protection’ into a conventional social protection system.
Index-based agricultural insurance has offered the promise of overcoming the hurdles of traditional indemnity-based insurance for economic development. This paper describes how existing constraints on take-up can partially be overcome using revised contract designs, advanced technology for better measurement, improved marketing and better policy.
