Forte Insurance
Forte is a large insurance company active in Cambodia since 1999. The company had a revenue of about $39.5 million in 2018 and offers various insurance products. Car, asset and life insurance are its main products. These mainstream insurance products are not very relevant for poor and low-income people. However, in 2016, the company
established crop/weather and social health insurance as a new business line to serve the poor and low-income farmers.
The customers of the social insurance are poor (about 25% of customers) and low-income people (70%). The annual health insurance premium ($7.5 per year) is affordable to poor and low-income people. However, the health insurance only covers $5 hospital cash allowance per day, and will not be sufficient to cover catastrophic health costs like surgeries and more expensive treatment costs.
The crop insurance costs $20-30 per hectare. Customers have an average land size of 2.5 hectares and are hence are mostly low-income farmers (40 per cent) and higher income farmers (60 per cent) rather than poor farmers. Crop insurance is currently provided to about 1,000 people but the plan is to scale to 25,000 farmers by 2023, subject to realizing public procurement subsidies from the Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fishery.