Picture-Based Insurance is a new, innovative way of delivering affordable, comprehensive, and easy-to-understand crop insurance. By relying on visible crop characteristics derived from farmers’ own smartphone pictures, the project aims to minimize the costs of loss verification and detect damage at the plot level, making crop insurance more attractive and accessible to small farmers. Importantly, such an instrument lends itself to natural synergies with agro-advisories, adoption of climate-smart practices, and other value added services.

Where we work

IFPRI and its partners are testing this approach in different locations in Ethiopia, Kenya and India. While initially, the research was focused on providing a proof of concept for the technology, our current focus is on analyzing how improved crop monitoring affects insurance markets and whether the technology has applications beyond insurance.

In addition, the research program analyzes the impacts of services facilitated by this technology, such as insurance, seeds or credit, on smallholder farmers’ productivity, welfare and resilience, while paying attention to mechanisms through which the technology can reduce—rather than aggravate—inequity and gender gaps.

Scroll over the map to learn more about where we work.

Project notes

• Seeing is believing: Using crop pictures in personalized advisory services
• Picture-based crop insurance: Is it feasible?
• Picture-based insurance: Is it sustainable?
• Digital technologies for financial inclusion of smallholder farmers
• A new model for inclusive seed delivery: Lessons from a pilot study in Kenya

Report

• COVID-19: Accelerating the use of digital agriculture

Scientific articles

• Enhancing adaptive capacity through climate-smart insurance: Theory and evidence from India (Presented at the International Conference of Agricultural Economists)
  • This paper received the T. W. Schultz Prize for the Best Contributed Paper at the International Conference of Agricultural Economists 2018 in Vancouver. The paper scored highest among the 1,250 submitted papers and was presented during the closing Plenary of the Conference. It focuses on how to better integrate agricultural insurance and climate-smart agricultural practices and technologies, with a case study on how to use insurance to reduce residue burning in northwestern India.
• From Index to Indemnity Insurance using Farmers' Ground Pictures: The Demand for Picture-Based Crop Insurance (IFPRI Discussion Paper)
• Monitoring crop phenology using a smartphone based near-surface remote sensing approach (Published in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology)

  • A first step in the automation of damage assessment at individual smallholder fields based on streams of pictures, the paper presents a methodology to automate image processing, greenness index calculation, and to quantify important phenological stages in wheat. In addition, the study finds considerable advantages to using near-surface imagery relative to satellite remote sensing data.

• The feasibility of Picture-Based insurance (PBI): Smartphone pictures for affordable crop insurance (Published in Development Engineering)
• Funded by the NERC, FCDO, and the Economic & Social Research Council, the project team will be conducting research in collaboration with the University of Manchester and HDFC Ergo General Insurance to develop novel weather index-based insurance contracts that reliably and accurately predict weather-related crop yield losses by combining crop growth modelling, satellite and smartphone imagery of crop growth status, and high-resolution gridded estimates of spatial weather variability.
• Seeing is Believing, the project’s component focusing on the case for bundling picture-based insurance with personalized advisories, conducted in collaboration with CABI, was the winner of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture’s 2018 Inspire Challenge Scale Up grant. The Inspire Challenge encourages the use of big data approaches to advance agricultural research and development and awards its Scale Up grant to pilots that have demonstrated viability for scaling and potential for impact.
• Funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research’s NWO-WOTRO Science for Global Development and in collaboration with Wageningen University, University of Groningen, Agriculture and Climate Risk Enterprise (ACRE), and Kenya Agricultural & Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), the team will investigate the cost-effectiveness within different types of seed systems of promoting adaptive capacity through a holistic risk management approach.
• The paper “Enhancing adaptive capacity through climate-smart insurance: Theory and evidence from India” received the T. W. Schultz Prize for the Best Contributed Paper at the International Conference of Agricultural Economists 2018 in Vancouver. The paper scored highest among the 1,250 submitted papers and was presented during the closing Plenary of the Conference.
• The paper “Monitoring crop phenology using a smartphone based near-surface remote sensing approach” was published in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. A first step in the automation of damage assessment at individual smallholder fields based on streams of pictures, the paper presents a methodology to automate image processing, greenness index calculation, and to quantify important phenological stages in wheat. In addition, the study finds considerable advantages to using near-surface imagery relative to satellite remote sensing data.