Global Index Insurance Facility
Chadrasiri Wanasundera protects his tea farm in Sri Lanka with index insurance © Kaavya Krishna/World Bank Group
The Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF) is a dedicated World Bank Group's program that facilitates access to finance for smallholder farmers, micro-entrepreneurs, and microfinance institutions through the provisions of catastrophic risk transfer solutions and index-based insurance in developing countries. Funded by the European Union/ACP, the governments of Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands, GIIF has facilitated more than 4.6 million contracts, with $730 million in sums insured, covering approximately 23 million people, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Providing access to finance for the vulnerable, insurance is an important element to poverty alleviation. Unfortunately, agricultural insurance and disaster insurance are either unavailable or prohibitively expensive in many developing countries. Index insurance is an innovative approach to insurance provision that pays out benefits on the basis of a pre-determined index or loss of assets and investments resulting from weather and catastrophic events, without requiring the traditional services of insurance claims assessors. It also allows for the claims settlement process to be quicker and more objective. See FAQ Index Insurance for more information.
The Global Index Insurance Facility is managed by the World Bank Group, as part of the Finance, Competitiveness & Innovation Global Practice.
To learn more, please visit: www.indexinsuranceforum.org
Example of What We Do
One of GIIF's implementing partners in Sub-Saharan Africa, ACRE Africa, was recently incorporated as a brokerage company with support from the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture. ACRE has developed weather, area yield, and livestock index insurance products - sold under the label Kilimo Salama – that cover a wide range of crops and dairy cattle, insuring more than 800,000 farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania.
GIIF Newsletters
The GIIF Newsletter is a quarterly publication that aims to capture the key developments, issues and discussions from across the micro-insurance and index insurance industry. To read and subscribe, please click here.
GIIF Contacts
Click here for GIIF contacts
