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Over 2.5 billion of the world’s adults remain unbanked and have no access to formal banking or semiformal microfinance institutions according to a report by McKinsey.

Pula Advisors, a fintech firm reimagining agricultural insurance to protect smallholders worldwide, with operations in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Malawi has partnered with the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) to deploy satellite-based agricultural insurance to smallholder farmers in Nigeria who are estimated to be around 18 million. With the partnership, Pula will install satellite technology to track a wide range of catastrophes cost effectively, at speed and without missing out on any areas.

“We hope that the high-quality yield and satellite data available today will enable local insurers and Pula Advisors to create an innovative yield predictive model that decreases the cost of area yield index insurance. At the end of the day, we want to make this product more accessible to smallholder families, allowing them to invest with more confidence and increase their yields,” said Emilio Hernandez, who leads CGAP’s work with smallholders.

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.

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.

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.

frica is one of the world’s hot regions for insurance. Steady economic growth in most countries combined with a largely underdeveloped insurance sector have positioned the continent as the second-fastest-growing region for insurance globally after Latin America.

We started Bismart as an online comparison platform that creates trasparency in the insurance Industry by allowing customers to compare benefits and price and chose insurance based on information. Through data analytics, we learnt that the new and non-traditional customer/ the digital and mobile customer has unique preference for processes and products.

We started Bismart as an online comparison platform that creates trasparency in the insurance Industry by allowing customers to compare benefits and price and chose insurance based on information. Through data analytics, we learnt that the new and non-traditional customer/ the digital and mobile customer has unique preference for processes and products.

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.

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.

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.

Bismart, a Kenyan insure-tech company has unveiled an online e-commerce platform that will enable insurance companies, brokers, agents to connect with their customers end- to- end.

Bismart, a Kenyan insure-tech company has unveiled an online e-commerce platform that will enable insurance companies, brokers and agents to connect with their customer’s end- to- end. Known as Pamsmart, the cloud-based platform will allow different players to create products relevant to specific target group and businesses.

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).

As part of Lumkani’s mission to mitigate the loss of life and property caused by fires in South Africa and across the globe, we implement large scale roll-outs of our fire detection system into urban informal settlements and townships.

Before Lumkani introduced Fire Cover in 2016, there was little hope for households and businesses that had been excluded from insurance cover, to quickly rebuild, refurnish and return to a state of dignity.

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.

If you would have told me 10 years ago that I would be running a company that does agriculture insurance, I would not have believed you. Agriculture has not been an area that people have invested in across Africa. Many of my cousins and childhood friends still work on their farms, but they are reluctant to invest, putting in only what they can afford to lose.The reason they don’t invest is simple. The chance of them losing their money due to the vagaries of the weather is huge. Working in insurance got me to understand about probabilities of loss early on — probabilities that cause our continent to be food insecure.

Pula’s mission is to give farmers confidence by providing risk mitigation. Our solutions protect a farmer’s investment by pairing it with insurance. We build business cases to persuade Fortune 500 companies, seed and fertilizer suppliers, lending institutions, and governments in Africa, that embedded insurance will help deliver better results for both businesses and food security.

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.

Pula says it provides farmers with insurance bundled with inputs (such as seeds and fertiliser) and farmer advisory services to help increase their yields and boost (and protect) their income. “In our five years since launching, we’ve built strong traction for our products. However, the fact remains that across Africa and other emerging markets, there are still millions of smallholder farmers with risks to their livelihoods that have not been covered,” says Goslinga. Insurance is unpopular in Africa, with the continent’s insurance penetration estimated to be 2.8% in 2017. Insurance penetration is particularly low in the agricultural sector, and convincing farmers to buy insurance during favourable seasons is difficult.

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.

JUMO builds its credit profiles using behavioral data gathered from mobile wallets, cell phones and transaction data.

JUMO is a transaction and predictive technology platform that partners with mobile network operators and banks to offer customers microloans and access to savings and insurance products. They are currently active in six markets – Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia and Pakistan – with plans to soon launch in India, Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria. JUMO has helped disburse over $1.6 billion in funding to small and micro enterprises, and has helped connect over 15 million people to credit and savings services.

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.

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.

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