Latest issue of Microinsurance Network newsletter available now
Microinsurance Network, April 2009: Microinsurance: Improving risk management for the poor, Nr. 18
This latest issue includes following articles: Technology for microinsurance, Microcare: Effective technology for poor populations, as well as news about websites, publications and the Microinsurance Network.
The newsletter is available in English, French and Spanish and can be downloaded from the Microinsurance Newsletter page.
Pre-Feasibility Analysis: Index-Based Weather Risk Transfer in Mali
Save the Children, USAID and GlobalAgRisk,February 2009
Jason Hartell and Jerry Skees
This report by Save the Children is an assessment of several preconditions of the conditions for developing a weather insurance market in Mail including: the legal and regulatory environment; acceptance of the concept by users; quality of the weather infrastructure; correlation of weather events across space; and potential for developing a weather index that matches crop yields.
While the research revealed difficulty in determining a correspondence between rainfall levels and crop yields, the findings leave open the possibility of relying on other index-related approaches to design a rainfall drought insurance contract for farmers in Mali.
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Proceedings of the First Microinsurance Conference in Pakistan now available
The First Microinsurance Conference was organised by the Rural Support Programmes Network (RSPN) in collaboration with the Department of International Development-UK (DFID-UK), Asian Development Bank (ADB), Pakistan Microfinance Network (PMN) and Adamjee Insurance, in Pakistan (December 2008).
The conference was aimed at promoting a broader understanding of microinsurance and provided a platform for sharing experiences and lessons. A cross section of participants, including practitioners from Rural Support Programmes (RSPs), national and international NGOs, microfinance institutions
(MFIs), microfinance banks (MFBs), insurance companies, donors, representatives of the State Bank of Pakistan, and senior government officials, attended the conference to share and debate experiences and best practices in microinsurance for the low-income families in Pakistan and South
Asia.
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Latest issue of the ICMIF Development Newsletter
ICMIF is pleased to inform you that the fifth issue of the ICMIF Development Newsletter "Prosper" is now available.
In this issue we recognize the 30th anniversary of CIC Kenya and report on the first support project of the ICMIF Disaster Relief Network (DRN) to victims of flooding in Bihar, India. The cover page highlights the ongoing collaboration between Etiqa and the national cooperative apex body in Malaysia to provide microtakaful to low income sectors.
Comments and contributions for the next issue are always welcome.
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Contract Design in Insurance Groups
University of Oxford, Dpt. of Economics Discussion Paper Series Nr. 421, January 2009 by Tessa Bold and Stefan Decron
In many rural settings, informal mutual support networks have evolved into semiformal insurance groups, such as funeral societies. Using detailed panel data for six villages in Ethiopia, the paper can distinguish two types of contracts, in terms of whether payments are only made at the time of death or savings are accumulated by the group based on premiums paid ex-ante. The paper characterizes these contracts as the coalition-proof equilibria of a symmetric and stationary risk-sharing game, and we show numerically that a contract with savings makes higher demands on enforceability, leading to less cohesive groups finding it in their interest to choose the contract without savings and that coalition-proofness is a necessary condition for the coexistence of both contract types.
The authors show in the data that the type of contract chosen by groups is correlated with the level of trust and other enforcement improving factors. They also predict that among the observed contracts, those with group-based savings and ex-ante payments will attain higher welfare in terms of consumption smoothing than those observed using no group savings.
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