Publication database

The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) launched the Advancing Women’s Empowerment Fund (AWEF) in 2019 with support from the Visa Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The overall goal of AWEF-funded projects is to address the gender financing gap for women-owned small and growing businesses (SGBs) in developing economies. The first round of grantmaking, AWEF Asia, funded eight entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs) in Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, the Philippines, Pakistan, and India, as well as programs serving the region as a whole. This report summarizes the lessons learned from these grants.

“Can health microinsurance (HMI) schemes achieve sustainability?” As with many seemingly simple questions, there is no simple answer. The answer to this question is of interest to a variety of parties. Insurance providers seek to understand if there is a viable business case for offering an HMI product. Health-care providers and pharmaceutical companies are interested in whether or not HMI can be a means for broadening coverage. Donors and other funding organizations want to know if HMI is a viable investment as a means to improve health-care access, health outcomes and financial protection for the low-income population. Governments consider how to use HMI schemes as a step towards universal health coverage.

This paper seeks to answer this simple yet crucial question based on the experiences of five schemes in South Asia.

National Rural Support Programme (NRSP) of Pakistan participated in the ILO’s Microfinance for Decent Work (MF4DW) action research programme from 2008-2012. As part of this experimental research, NRSP launched and tested an extended microinsurance product (health and accidental death) covering extra-nuclear family members of the same household in order to see if there was a positive impact on the reduction of child labour among 2,097 client households, using a target versus control group methodology.

Most providers of health microinsurance (HMI) can do more to understand the illness and claims patterns of insured clients. The objective of this study is to demonstrate that analysing claims data equips HMI practitioners with valuable insights to improve the client value and viability of HMI programmes. The study performs a comparative analysis of three South Asian HMI programmes – run by VimoSEWA, Uplift Mutuals and Naya Jeevan. These providers share a common geographic region and offer broadly similar insurance for hospitalization services to low-income households.

The objective of this study was to conduct a community-based retrospective analysis of primary, secondary and tertiary care utilization over a 12 month period by 5000 urban slum dwellers in the context of an integrated health insurance plan (outpatient and inpatient) that was introduced by Naya Jeevan into Sultanabad (an urban slum in Karachi) during the 2013 calendar year.

Financing health for low income households is a significant challenge. Naya Jeevan is trying an innovative approach: in order to make quality health services affordable to low-income workers in Pakistan, it seeks sponsors to pay the majority of the premium on behalf of workers whom they employ or have a business relationship with.

Child labour is a common consequence of economic shocks in developing countries. Research Paper #32 explores how reducing vulnerability through insurance impacts child labour and schooling. Using the case of a health and accident insurance scheme by a Pakistani microfinance institution, the study finds that increased insurance coverage results in lower incidence of child labour and reduced earnings from child labour. The effect is largely attributed to an ex-ante feeling of protection as opposed to a shock-mitigation effect.