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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.

In addition to this, motor insurance providers have had to contend with cases of double insurance, fake insurance certificates, and stolen insurance certificates. Research carried out by Bismart showed that 12% of insurance policies do not exist in the underwriters’ databases even though the motor vehicle owners have paid for their premiums. 22% of the motor vehicle insurance policies surveyed cannot be validated.

Fawry Insurance Brokerage partners with AIG Egypt Insurance Company to launch the digital insurance policy “Qershak el Abyad” through 166,500 Fawry outlets and e-wallets, allowing the insurance policy for more than 30 million Egyptian Fawry users throughout Egypt. The policy provides 75k EGP insurance coverage upon accidents of the candidate, with a monthly premium starting at 10 EGP.

The Financial Regulatory Authority agrees on delivering "Qershak el Abyad" insurance policy through e-channels - Fawry

“Fawry Insurance Brokerage, a subsidiary of Fawry, will play a genuine role in marketing and selling the insurance policies of “Qershak el Abyad” program to millions of Egyptians and payments will be available through more than 166,500 Fawry machines and through e-wallets, so that customers will receive their policies electronically on mobile phones easily, this in cooperation with AIG Egypt Insurance Company, in a step that enhances financial inclusion in Egypt according to the plans and directives of the Egyptian government.”

In 2017 MTN Ghana – the local subsidiary of the South African mobile operator, and the market leader – redefined what constitutes a subscriber, removing 3.4m inactive lines from its network in the first quarter of the year. However, in the same quarter the company gained more than 800,000 new active customers. The net effect was a drop of 2.5m in its subscriber base, leaving it with 16.9m voice subscribers, according to the NCA.

MTN Ghana holds the largest market share. As of April 2017 it had a 56.1% share of mobile data services and 46.9% of voice. It also held 59.7% of broadband wireless access through its 4G services.

The firm saw revenue growth of 19.8% in 2016 on the back of its strong performance in the data segment. According to the company’s financial results, data revenue increased by 66% and accounted for 42% of total revenue in 2016 on the back of the launch of a 4G network.

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 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.

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.

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.

Sahar Salama, CEO of TPAY Mobile says that its platform will “provide one simple integration giving digital entertainment players all-inclusive capabilities for bundling, billing, and multi-channel acquisition access to new markets and audiences covering up to 80% of the Middle East and Africa (MEA) population. What we bring to the table is an easy and convenient fintech solution built for mobile operators to connect even more users with premium digital services like Jawwy TV.”

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.

As for the competitive advantages, we are the most popular service, compared to the rest of the companies, on top of our work during the current period to expand the range of services that we offer, where we signed a contract with beIN SPORTS for their customers to pay subscriptions through us. We also agreed with the company to pick up premiums from beIN customers€one million customers to date€in addition to more than 200 services that we currently have.

Mohamed Okasha, managing director of Fawry, said the company plans to increase its outlets to 100,000 in 2018 compared to 70,000 outlets this year. The company also provides e-payment services for monthly installment payments for the beneficiaries of social housing projects.

Pula is providing radically restructured agriculture insurance for smallhold farmers in Africa. Using satellite technology and data to provide previously uninsured landowners with a better safety net, Pula policies are free for the farmers. Premiums are paid by input companies or farm aggregators whose business interests are served by protecting farmers’ incomes.