Risk and poverty are inextricably linked. Susceptibility to risk is a defining feature of what it means to be poor. Poor people often live in environments characterized by high weather and disease risk, and it is poor households that have the fewest tools to deal with drought, floods, and disease when they occur. Breaking the link between risk and poverty by insuring poor people both lessens the affliction of poverty and allows poor people to participate in income growth.
This set of briefs considers how to increase the tools available to poor households to manage agricultural and health risks. The focus is how to develop insurance markets, along with other financial instruments such as credit, savings, and social protection policies. The series does not document the proven impact of insurance markets for the welfare of poor people; rather, it brings together briefs written by businesspeople, policymakers, and researchers that document innovations, lessons learned, and areas of future work and action.
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Download (PDF 741K) - Brief 1 - Innovations in insuring the poor : Overview
Ruth Vagas Hill and Maximo Torero
Download (PDF 154K) - Brief 2 - Risk and the rural poor
John Hoddinott
Download (PDF 161K) | Download annex (PDF 42K) - Brief 3 - Risk, poverty and insurance
Stefan Dercon
Download (PDF 155K) - Brief 4 - Microinsurance for health and agricultural risks
Richard Leftley
Download (PDF 152K) - Brief 5 - Sustainability and scalability of index-based insurance for agriculture and rural livelihoods
Ulrich Hess and Peter Hazell
Download (PDF 160K) | Download annex (PDF 50K) - Brief 6 - Intelligent design of index insurance for smallholder farmers and pastoralists
Michael R. Carter
Download (PDF 159K) | Download annex (PDF 179K) - Brief 7 - Experience with weather index-based insurance in India and Malawi
Xavier Giné
Download (PDF 157K) - Brief 8 - Providing weather index and indemnity insurance in Ethiopia
Eyob Meherette
Download (PDF 155K) - Brief 9 - Index-based livestock insurance in Mongolia
Olivier Mahul, Nathan Belete and Andrew Goodland
Download (PDF 164K) - Brief 10 - Health insurance for the rural poor
David I. Levine
Download (PDF 155K) - Brief 11 - Innovations in health insurance
Johannes Jütting
Download (PDF 153K) - Brief 12 - Microfinance and unexpected consumption expenditures
Richard Hornbeck
Download (PDF 243K) - Brief 13 - Providing insurance through microfinance institutions
Rupalee Ruchismita and Sona Varma
Download (PDF 154K) | Download annex (PDF 43K) - Brief 14 - Social protection and risk
John Hoddinott
Download (PDF 261K) - Brief 15 - Index insurance applied to agriculture
Amado Villarreal González
Download (PDF 155K)
