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From a larger context, Eunice Maina, the CEO of Bismart Insurance in Kenya, associated the low penetration of insurance in the east African country to the traditional nature of insurance practiced in Kenya.  She asserted that the largest economy in east Africa practices informal insurance resulting in the low penetration of the market.“Kenya practices informal insurance in the form of crowdfunding and that has affected the penetration rate,” she said. However, Maina is of the view that rather than adopting the European pattern, traditional insurance should be developed without having to deviate from the African model. She, therefore, solicited for the use of African perspective in developing insurance in the region as techniques to tackle cultural and religious barriers in the insurance industry.

African agriculture, especially small farms, have not had it easy over the past few years. Droughts, pests, floods, and local conflict have exacerbated challenges for many food producers. This is why insurtech startup Pula is working to provide small farmers with insurance to help manage the implications of climate change and other environmental uncertainties. The startup begins the farming season by sending representatives to farms to gauge the potential yield of the season. Pula then sends this estimate to insurance companies to generate a policy offer. According to Pula, the initiative has been so successful because in every African country they have worked in, there are insurance companies willing to support their initiative.

Another startup is Apollo Agriculture which raised $6 million Series A, akin to Pula. Not only did the pair raise the same round, Apollo Agriculture and Pula both deal with providing financial resources to smallholder farmers.

Pula is solving this problem by using technology and data. Through its Area Yield Index Insurance product, the insurtech startup leverages machine learning, crop-cut experiments and data points relating to weather patterns and farmer losses, to build products that cater to various risks.But getting farmers on board has never been easy, Goslinga told TechCrunch. According to her, Pula has understood not to sell insurance directly to small-scale farmers, because they can suffer from optimism bias. “Some think a climate disaster wouldn’t hit their farms for a particular season; hence, they don’t ask for insurance initially. But if they witness any of these climate risks during the season, they would want to get insurance, which is counterproductive to Pula,” said the founder in a phone call.

Pula, a Kenyan insurtech startup that specialises in digital and agricultural insurance to derisk millions of smallholder farmers across Africa, has closed a Series A investment of $6 million.The round was led by Pan-African early-stage venture capital firm, TLcom Capital, with participation from nonprofit Women’s World Banking. The raise comes after Pula closed $1 million in seed investment from Rocher Participations with support from Accion Venture Lab, Omidyar Network and several angel investors in 2018.

Bismart Insurance enables the uninsured African population to access Insurance through co-creating relevant products with existing affinity groups like saccos, schools, welfare groups, Micro-finance institutions etc and connecting them to insurance companies through technology.  At Bismart platform customers are able to reveiw and rate their insurance providers based on their experience, this forces insurance players to compete in giving our customers the best customer experience.

At Bismart platform customers are able to reveiw and rate their insurance providers based on their experience, this forces insurance players to compete in giving our customers the best customer experience.We enable customers to compare insurance policies from muiltiple providers not just based on price but based on benefits, exclusions and other customers reviews.

WorldCover investor and EchoVC founder Eghosa Omoigui believes the startup’s insurance offerings can actually help farmers improve yield. “Weather-risk drives a lot of decisions with these farmers on what to plant, when to plant, and how much to plant,” he said. “With the crop insurance option, the farmer says, ‘Instead of one hector, I can now plant two or three, because I’m covered.’ ”

WorldCover’s platform uses satellite imagery, on-ground sensors, mobile phones and data analytics to create insurance options for farmers whose crop yields are affected adversely by weather events — primarily lack of rain.

Pula, a five-year old insurtech startup, provides small scale farmers with agricultural insurance to help manage the risk of enduring extreme conditions. Insurtech is one of the fast-growing sub-sectors of the fintech, which has booming with investors in African startups.

Pula will also be expanding to Asia, targeting smallholder farmers as it has in Africa, with a focus on Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, and Pakistan. “What we’ve realized is that African solutions are in no way inferior to Asian, European solutions

Since it was founded in 2015, Pula has impacted 4.3 million farmers across 13 African markets. Goslinga says key to Pula’s business model is helps insurance companies better understand the risks of small scale farming.With an average premium subscription of $4 for small-scale farmers in Africa, Pula actually markets the insurance product to banking partners rather than directly to farmers. The banks make the insurance mandatory before they approve loans to the farmers.

WorldCover began with pilot programs in several African countries. Four years on, it has sold drought insurance to about 30,000 customers. Its largest customer base is in Ghana, and it recently expanded into Kenya. But the firm has also encountered some of the same market barriers that have hampered other African microinsurance programs.

WorldCover began with pilot programs in several African countries. Four years on, it has sold drought insurance to about 30,000 customers. Its largest customer base is in Ghana, and it recently expanded into Kenya. But the firm has also encountered some of the same market barriers that have hampered other African microinsurance programs.

Despite robust financial subsidies, many programs have found that selling insurance to poor African farmers is extremely challenging. This remains the case even when risk products are bundled with other services, such as community savings programs and training in how to improve crop yields. For instance, a 10-year-old government farm insurance program in Ghana has fallen far short of expectations, according to multiple observers—including the same Christopher Udry who inspired Sheehan to create WorldCover. Udry and colleagues reported in a March 2019 paper that the government insurance program had had little meaningful impact. In Kenya and Ethiopia, risk transfer programs aimed at pastoralists have had disappointing results, according to an extensively researched June 2019 article in Devex, which was underwritten by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation. Experts point to two main types of obstacles. First, there are enormous marketing and logistical challenges inherent in trying to sell small insurance policies to very poor farmers who’ve never heard of the concept, live in remote areas and may only speak indigenous languages. Second, it’s difficult to build customer loyalty for an abstract product that often doesn’t provide what farmers expect. The Devex story describes how some pastoralists thought they were putting money into a savings account. When they didn’t get their premiums back, “they start[ed] thinking that this product has failed them,” a coordinator said.

Lumkani, a Johannesburg-based startup that leverages proprietary hardware and a tech-enabled agent network to provide customers living in informal settlements within South Africa with insurance products that protect against loss of life, shelter, and assets in the case of a home fire. Lumkani, which means ‘be careful’ in Xhosa, originally began as a hardware company, deploying its first fire detector in late 2014. Within the first 18 months, they were able to prove that their technology “in 73 percent of cases was able to reduce the spreading of fires [beyond] the first home.” But it was not enough just to alert the community and stop the spreading of fires.

Destructive fires are a regular, and potentially devastating, occurrence for the approximately 10 million South Africans that live in informal settlement communities. These townships are particularly susceptible to the threat of fires due to the use of flammable building materials, the ubiquity of open flame fires, limited space between dwellings, and a lack of road infrastructure for adequate emergency response.

JUMO offers a wide range of services to users in emerging markets via partnerships with other financial institutions

JUMO offers financial services infrastructure to third parties and has served over 15 million customers across countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan, and Tanzania, and it plans to use the fresh capital to launch new products and expand into new markets: It's set to launch in Bangladesh, India, Côte d'Ivoire, and Nigeria soon, per its website.

South African fintech JUMO scooped up $55 million in funding

Bismart Insurance – VC4A Original: vc4a.com Insurance Penetration in Kenya is at 2.7% due Lack of education/Knowledge, Mistrust, inaffordability and lack of transparency.

The Insurtech award which targets non-insurers collaborating with insurers to improve customer service delivery, product development and innovation was organised by the African Reinsurance Corporation (Africa Re). The company was recognised for successfully managing over 4.3 million smallholder farmers through their Area Yield Index Insurance product. It provides insurance services and digital solutions to farmers in 12 countries in Africa, with Nigeria being the leading market for Pula.

South African fintech startup Jumo closed a $55 million round from a diverse group of investors, the company confirmed.

Nigeria, in particular, has become Africa’s unofficial capital for fintech development, surpassing Kenya in 2019 for drawing the most fintech specific and overall VC on the continent

Jumo joins a growing list of African digital-finance startups raising big money from outside investors and expanding abroad.

At Pula, we are radically restructuring agricultural insurance, using technology to insure the previously unbanked, uninsured, untapped market of 1.5 billion smallholders worldwide. We work in nine countries across Africa and Asia, and in 2017 alone, we facilitated crop and livestock insurance cover to 611,000 farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Malawi.

Pula uses satellite data and farm yield measurements to understand how weather patterns affect a smallholder farmer’s yield, and uses this information to automate compensation in case of loss. The company also provides farmers with targeted agronomic advice via SMS messaging, helping them grow more from their existing landholdings.

Insurtech startup Pula announced today that it has closed a seed funding round to advance its efforts to provide insurance to smallholder farmers in Africa and South Asia.

JUMO also has a mobile wallet technology that offers an easy-to-use service that is accessible via mobile devices.Watkins-Ball commented on the cost-effective technology used to collect information which strengthened the business model, He said: “When we founded JUMO, we were always clear that we can only achieve our mission by leveraging sophisticated information technologies at really low cost.

“Common investor wisdom is to stay in your market and dominate. This assumes that you are expanding on your own but we believe that by collaborating and partnering deliberately, Carbon and other tech companies can scale faster and build more enduring platforms,” Chijioke Dozie, chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder of Carbon, said. 

Nigerian fintech startup Carbon has set up a US$100,000 pan-African fund to address the lack of funding and support holding back entrepreneurs on the continent.Consumer lending platform Carbon, which rebranded in April as parent company OneFi continues to transition into being a full digital banking platform after raising US$5 million in debt funding and acquiring Nigerian payments startup Amplify, has been busy expanding its offering, and has also moved into new markets with a Kenyan launch.Its “Disrupt fund” is the first of its kind by an African fintech startup, and will invest up to US$10,000 per startup for five per cent equity. Portfolio companies will also be given access to Carbon’s API, allowing them to leverage Carbon’s growing customer base and innovative technology platform to get to market faster. Carbon expects the initiative to spark more collaboration and further investment that should drive growth across the ecosystem, and is accepting applications from companies with operations in Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Egypt. Startups looking to apply for the fund must have a functioning product, be post-revenue, and be looking to operate in multiple countries. The fund has a wide investment mandate but target sectors include insurance, health and education.“There are many excellent companies across the continent looking for the kind of scale Nigeria offers and we are excited to partner with them to provide the support and financial investment they need. We are equally excited to expand beyond Nigeria and Kenya by working with a new generation of innovators across the continent and sharing our experience to tackle common obstacles to growth.”

Nigerian fintech startup Carbon has set up a US$100,000 pan-African fund to address the lack of funding and support holding back entrepreneurs on the continent.

Across Pula’s eight African markets, insurance penetration rates are typically less than 5 percent. Pula innovates to improve this. The farmers realize that insurance is useful, but they are not willing to pay its upfront cost.

Also, in its quest to become a digital bank, Carbon acquired a microfinance bank license. According to Dozie, the license means that Carbon’s customers are afforded additional protection through depositors’ insurance via the NDIC. The Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation, a federal insurance agency, protects depositors and guarantees the settlement of insured funds when a financial institution can no longer repay their deposits. With that in place, Dozie says the typical Carbon wallet is now a full-fledged bank account, and customers can perform transactions on the platform as they would with any bank.Like Carbon, other startups on the continent have followed suit by releasing year-on-year metrics. In recent memory, most of these startups play in the fintech and crypto-exchange space. But Carbon remains unique amongst this crop of companies as it releases both transaction stats and real insights into its financial performance.Whereas transaction stats tend to highlight a seemingly explosive year-on-year growth of a company, a comprehensive view of financials will likely show a mixed performance. For instance, Carbon generated $17.5 million in revenue for FY2019, up 68% from 2018. For that same period, it recorded a 23% decrease in its profit after tax numbers, a 222% rise in total liabilities and 107% increase in assets finishing the year off with a 6% increase in total equity.It’ll be interesting to see what these numbers look like for 2020. But that’s not the only event to keep an eye on. In addition to its $10 million Series A from SA-based Net1 UEPS Technologies and a $5million debt financing in 2019 from Lendable, Dozie says the digital bank, which also has a presence in Kenya, is ramping efforts to raise a Series B round soon to consolidate its position on the continent.

Nigerian digital bank Carbon hit $240M in payments processed last year, up 89% from 2019

In 2018, Carbon, a Nigerian fintech startup, made its financials public for the first time. Although typical for foreign private startups, it’s almost an anomaly in Africa. There have been rare cases in the past, for instance, when Rocket Internet had to include Jumia’s financials in its yearly reports after going public. At the time, the German investment outfit was a founding shareholder in the African-based unicorn.

We design and deliver best in class agriculture index insurance products to protect farmers

Pula handles end to end management of the delivery of insurance to farmers, including field operations, farmer onboarding/education and claims assessment and payouts.

Cassava FinTech is a pan-African business using an integrated model to drive financial inclusion and digital transactions across the continent. Our core operations in Mobile Money, Social Payments Services, Digital Banking, International Remittances and Mobile Micro Insurance with presence in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Burundi, Lesotho and UK and partnerships in other African countries