Newly Published Paper on Microinsurance for Disaster Recovery

Joanna Faure Walker and I have recently published our paper entitled “Microinsurance for disaster recovery: Business venture or humanitarian intervention? An analysis of potential success and failure factors of microinsurance case studies” in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

The paper is based around a review of a number of microinsurance case studies from the last 20 years and from around the world. Microinsurance as both a humanitarian and a development initiative has evolved significantly to incorporate new partners in the design, supply and delivery of more contextually appropriate and socially conscious financial products for lower-income markets. However, there is certainly no one-fix-all solution to the provision of financial services to low-income populations, particularly in relation to assisting with disaster relief, recovery and longer-term resilience building, and many either fail to deliver on their initial objectives to protect people or they simply fail to operate sustainably and cease their services.

In our paper, we begin exploring what factors may contribute towards the success and failure of global microinsurance products, and discuss whether microinsurance products can serve as effective humanitarian interventions in times of crisis, or better serve as viable business propositions, or serve their communities as a combination of the two, depending on the context. Our findings, along with our suggestions of minimum metrics for recording the performance of microinsurance programmes over time, are intended to help further the discussion on defining microinsurance, to inform microinsurance initiatives that may be set up to address the challenges of post-disaster transitions to recovery, and to aid in the tracking of longer-term community impact.

Visit here to read more and to download the paper.

 

Rebekah Yore

UCL Institue for Risk and Disaster Reduction

rebekah.yore.14@ucl.ac.uk (07732 174252)