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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.

Over the last decade, there has been a global increase in the focus on climate change and the risks and dangers associated with it. And for good reason. Damage from climate-related disasters was in the billions of dollars in 2019 alone. California wildfires caused $25 billion in property damage, while Typhoon Hagibis in Japan cost an estimated $15 billion. Other extreme weather events, including rampant brush fires in Australia, widespread droughts in East Africa and severe flooding in South Asia, have had devastating consequences.

Like Kin, NYC-based WorldCover was created in response to climate-related disasters. It works to provide drought insurance to farmers in Africa. When first launched, WorldCover was available only in Ghana and covered only one crop: maize. Since then, the company has expanded to multiple markets in East and West Africa, covering four categories of crops: cereals, legumes, root vegetables and perennials. WorldCover uses a combination of satellite imagery and on-the-ground sensors to understand local weather patterns in order to create insurance options for farmers facing some of the world’s worst droughts. The company uses its satellites to monitor rainfall patterns and trigger payouts immediately.

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.

The policies or “smart contracts” currently under development are based on blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. This avoids the need for paperwork and means payouts can be triggered automatically when certain conditions are met, such as a specific number of days of drought. The system uses high-resolution satellite images to detect rainfall and plant growth data.Conventional crop insurance is too expensive for more than 500m small farmers worldwide, says Christopher Sheehan, founder and chief executive of US-based WorldCover, which developed the system. “But with machine learning and blockchain technology, we can process these data very cheaply to produce a really simple crop insurance product with premiums of $20 to $50 for a farmer who might only be earning $3,000 a year.” Payments can be made using mobile money transfer services such as M-Pesa.

Across the globe, smallholder farmers lose between $50 billion and $100 billion annually, often from natural disasters, but reportedly only 1% is insured from these accidents. As an example, in Feburary 2019, the company made several payouts to farmers in Kenya as poor rainfall caused large amount of crop failure.

Jason Schapiro, WorldCover Lead Engineer, said “Our algorithms are specifically calibrated to rainfall events by region and crop type, automatically triggering instant payouts to insured farmers through mobile money services like M-Pesa.”

Robert is a father of four and lives in the rural areas at the outskirts of Tamale, in northern Ghana. He lives off his one hectare of land where he grows maize and groundnuts. He sells part of it to the local market and eats the rest with his family. Like many of the 475 million smallholder farmers around the world, he faces constant threats of droughts or other weather hazards that can destroy his family’s main source of subsistence: Crops. Ninety percent of farmers in Africa have no access to crop insurance or other safety net.

WorldCover addresses this problem by providing farmers with simple and affordable microinsurance policies, insuring their crops against the risk of drought. Microinsurance and farmers receive rapid payout in cases of drought during the crop growth period. WorldCover ran a full pilot project in 2015 among Rice and Sorghum farmers and signed up a significant number of farmers, with many more committed.

Producers Ag Insurance Group, Inc., doing business as ProAg, provides crop insurance products and services to farmers. The Company offers multiple peril crop insurance that covers loss of crop yields from various types of natural causes including drought, excessive moisture, freeze, and disease.

Despite the technology underpinning WorldCover being really quite complicated (blockchain technology and machine learning), their product is amazingly simple; a crucial quality when doing business in rural areas where literacy levels are extremely poor. Essentially WorldCover is able to cut through the notoriously bureaucratic insurance claim system by ensuring insurance payments are automatically triggered once certain conditions are met, therefore increasing efficiency and eliminating fraudulent requests.

WorldCover is capable of providing premiums at a comparatively low-cost, which, like simplicity, is an essential part of their business model.

The company was recognized for successfully managing over 4.3 million smallholder farmers through their Area Risk Index and yield insurance product. It provides insurance services and digital solutions to farmers in Africa. The company uses the crop cut experiment as a claim assessment procedure. This assessment relies heavily on ground crop cuts and it’s fed on mobile apps which relay instant feedback to clients. 

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.

Founded in January 2015, WorldCover is a US-based insurance technology company that uses a peer-to-peer model to provide farmers in developing worlds with crop insurance against natural disasters and provides investors with diversified returns from the non-traditional financial markets.

Drought spells disaster for many farmers in the developing world as most lack crop insurance. No rain means no income, no food and not enough resources to replant the next year.

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.

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.

We believe we can bring parametric insurance to the worldBuilding our product from the ground up, five years ago we started by selling simple weather insurance to smallholder farmers in Africa via agents and in-person marketing - selling over 30,000 policies direct to farmers. Since those days, we have incorporated digital marketing, scaled our technology and sold our policies to customers around the world.We want to help high value crop growers manage their financial risk to climate change, unpredictable weather and natural disasters.WorldCover’s product vision is for commercial farmers to experience parametric insurance in a way that is easy to understand (simple), engenders trust (transparent), and fits them well at any size (tailored).

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.

Tailored Insurance For Almond FarmersWe have applied our argonomic modeling expertise to develop a specialty product focused on protecting almond growers against increasingly unpredictable weather patterns. Either as an alternative or supplement to your existing insurance, CropAssure Almond provides easy to understand policies, and pays out automatically when your covered risks occur.

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.

Two weeks ago a Kenyan fintech provider PULA was among 20 finalists pitching at the Singapore Fintech Festival. The presentation by the CTO Sitati Kituyi was selected among the winners, enabling the company to walk away with a cash prize of USD 50,000, getting an exclusive opportunity for networking with investors and a fast-tracked application for the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Financial Sector Technology and Innovation (FSTI) Proof-of-Concept Scheme. Pula ‘restructures agricultural insurance and seeks to use technology to insure the previously unbanked, uninsured and untapped market of smallhodlers across the globe. It facilitates crop and livestock insurance coverage and works with Fortune 500 companies, global NGOs, research institutions, and governments to help provide smallholders the protection they need in an increasingly unpredictable market.’ The finalists who eventually pitched for the Global Fintech Hackcelerator were selected through two parallel scouting programmes. The local programme which aimed to tackle problem statements originating from the financial industry in Singapore and the broader Asia region saw 10 winners shortlisted from among 200 submissions by companies across 30 countries.