Publication database

“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.

Briefing Note 35 presents results from a review of the financial performance of five schemes in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The microinsurance sector has grown from 78 million policies in 2007 to 500 million in 2012 and the exponential growth is expected to continue, since the potential market is estimated at 3–4 billion policies. However, for every scheme that has succeeded, many more have struggled to reach scale, become viable or provide client value, and some have failed altogether. Many innovations have resulted from efforts to convert these near-misses to successes. Briefing note 36 draws on the experience of 12 such attempts to identify the most common challenges that caused severe problems. The challenges are organized in five clusters: Viability, Client Value, Operations, Partnerships and External.

Given their limited capacities to cope, low income people can experience major setbacks when hit by even seemingly small shocks and can experience serious losses of wealth and welfare when big shocks strike. And merely the spectre of shocks can lead to underinvestment that makes even a smooth climb out of poverty take much longer than it otherwise might. 

Briefing Note 34 presents highlights from an analysis of risk within the Kenyan Financial Diaries, considering how 300 low-income people think about, experience and prepare for risks in their lives.

Insurance is an effective mechanism to complement or extend social protection schemes. By using insurance mechanisms and the insurance industry, governments can achieve various public policy objectives, such as improved food security and universal health coverage. Effective public-private partnerships (PPPs) can achieve scale and improve the quality of social protection programmes by leveraging the skills and resources of the partners. This brief presents ten recommendations that governments and insurers should follow when designing and implementing a PPP in insurance.

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. This brief summarizes a study that 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.

Across the world, insurers have shifted away from traditional agents and brokers to partner with various alternative distribution channels – ranging from churches, trade unions and mobile network operators to banks, retailers and even civil service organizations - as a way of reaching critical mass at low cost. This brief examines two of these channels – banking and retail correspondents – studying four examples in four countries.

This report is based on four case studies of agricultural value chain PPPPs developed through projects financed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Ghana, Indonesia, Rwanda and Uganda. It reviews existing literature on PPPPs, summaries of the key features of the case studies and field work, learnings drawn from the research and a PPPP checklist which outlines the role for brokers in the process.

This hands-on guide to why, and how, to set up partnership agreements, discusses how they are especially important to inclusive businesses. Although not legally binding in many cases, the process which all stakeholders need to go through (and the subsequent trust this builds) in order to arrive at a signed document are essential in created mutually beneficial partnerships for all involved.

The handbook deals with a number of key questions, namely (1) How should we define and track energy access?, (2) How should we use public and donor funding? (3) Why are kerosene subsidies harming the market? (4) What impact does VAT and import duty have on our sector and its customers? (5) Why do we need to see an increase in finance and investment in distributed, renewable energy? (6) Why is quality assurance of our products so important? (7) Why do we need to protect Intellectual Property and prevent counterfeit products? (8) How should we manage product life cycles and recycling?

This short briefing, the tenth in a series that demonstrates how specific products and services can expand the reach of financing for smallholder farmers, explores three channels through which value chain financing models can be delivered and identifies how these models can group “enablers” to best serve smallholders.