Insurance for Rural Resilience and Economic Development

INSURED is a US$6 million programme financed by Sida (the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) and implemented by IFAD through the Platform for Agricultural Risk Management (PARM).

The five‑year programme’s goal is threefold:
– increase the resilience of poor rural households in the face of the climate crisis
– build their capacity to manage risks
– strengthen their livelihoods.

The overall objective of INSURED is to protect the incomes of rural women and men and to promote investment in smallholder agriculture – by smallholders themselves and the public and private sectors, including financial service providers, value chain actors and governments.

INSURED works at different levels to help develop climate risk insurance for poor rural people and increase their resilience:

– It develops climate insurance policies and strategies in partnership with governments so they can create enabling environments for public and private institutions to offer insurance.
– It provides technical assistance to incorporate or strengthen agricultural and climate risk insurance products in the context of IFAD country programmes and strategies.
– It assesses the feasibility of insurance and gives technical assistance to designing, setting up and implementing holistic insurance schemes within rural development initiatives funded by IFAD and other actors.
– It creates and shares knowledge on insurance, including lessons learned, and builds the capacity of local public and private institutions, government partners and donors to use climate risk insurance as a cross-cutting tool.

Since INSURED started work in 2018, the programme has been active in 13 core countries (see map). It provides technical assistance to other IFAD country programmes on request.