Microinsurance is formal insurance for low-income people, who typically do not have access to adequate insurance products and services. Indeed, most people in developing and transition countries live without any formal means of protecting against risks, such as illness, disability, death, harvest failure and loss of livestock or personal effects.
Depending on the scheme, microinsurance is offered as a stand-alone service or attached to other offerings such as credit, savings, agricultural inputs etc.
Agriculture and Catastrophe Insurances are mostly large group insurance policies linked with governmental risk pools and strong government involvement where significant risk segments are transferred to the global reinsurance market. See also our "Savings and Credit Forum" on
Agricultural and Catastrophe Insurance (September 2013).
They are mostly not microinsurances, as they face special challenges that - in regard to natural disaster - are beyond the capacity of most insurance companies. Agriculture insurances can be categorised under livestock, crop and various agriculture-related index products.
SDC Resources
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Short introduction to the topic on SDC's Internet Site:
Micro-insurance - Hedging against livelihood risks
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SDC publication: Insurance for smallholder farmers and vulnerable households against catastrophic events - Guiding principles for donors and governments.
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Savings and Credit Fora: you might also want to have a look at the presentations given at our Savings and Credit Forum
"Agricultural Micro Insurance: Powerful Tool for Vulnerability Reduction of the Poor?" (November 26, 2010) and the Forum we held on
"Microinsurance: Introduction, case studies, outlook" (30 November 2007)
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f2f AFS and e+i 2012: SDC's Agricultural and Food Security Network, at their f2f meeting in 2012, together with the e+i network, organized a module on Agriculture Micro-Insurance (blog). A few
projects that SDC is working on, were presented.
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Training: in August 2012 the Focal Point Disaster Risk Reduction organised a training on "Risk transfer". For details go to
SDC's Desaster Risk Reduction Platform, there you will need to create an account to access the content of the course and there is a next
training at the University of Zürich (two-day course on Microinsurance) is planned for 2015- in collaboration with and support of SDC.
Publications/ Links
