Publication database

To scale successfully, you need to adapt your business model several times as you learn about your new markets, distribution networks, customer segments and other organisational challenges. In this tool we explore the use of lean startup principles such as experimentation, iteration, and learning to ensure your adaptations are based on evidence-based data.

Achieving scale is a significant success factor for microinsurance schemes, as low premiums with high costs require substantial volumes to make an initiative sustainable; however to achieve scale is difficult.

In an effort to identify lessons that support practitioners, the ILO’s Microinsurance Innovation Facility commissioned the Centre for Financial Inclusion and Regulation (Cenfri) to review microinsurance initiatives that have achieved scale  to identify and understand their trends and drivers in scale. Microinsurance Paper #30 analysed 95 Initiatives that achieved scale and evaluated 8 case studies in detail to understand what drives scale.

This report provides an in-depth study on the issue of market based solutions, reviewing when they do and don't achieve scale; why more market-based models are not achieving scale; and what barriers to scale that are faced. It describes market-based solutions that have achieved scale and how this has been achieved, and It discusses the journey to scale for entrepreneurial enterprises and larger companies serving poor consumers with beneficial products, and for those engaging poor producers.