ÿThe international conference on ?Weather index insurance in Africa: lessons learnt and goals for the future? was organised by the Department of Economics, University of the Western Cape, in collaboration with its international partners. The conference attracted over 40 participants drawn from academic and research institutions, insurance practitioners, reinsurers, government policy makers, bankers, agricultural producers, and representatives of non-governmental organisations. The presenters highlighted experiences, challenges and opportunities based on current pilot projects on weather index insurance in many parts of Africa.

This brief identifies and addresses key issues facing weather-index-based agricultural insurance. Drawing on diverse experiences from Africa and Central America, it zooms in on key challenges such as affordability, quality of weather data and models, raising awareness and trust in the benefits of insurance products and policy and regulatory frameworks. To have real impact, scale is the first requirement. Scaling strategies require reliable products, access to the rural areas, increased awareness about insurance and cost-effective delivery channels.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book aims to inspire decision makers and practitioners to change their approach to climate planning in the tropics through the application of modern technologies for characterizing local climate and tracking vulnerability and risk, and using decision-making tools. Drawing on 16 case studies conducted mainly in the Caribbean, Central America, Western and Eastern Africa, and South East Asia it is shown how successful integration of traditional and modern knowledge can enhance disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change in the tropics. The case studies encompass both rural and urban settings and cover different scales: rural communities, cities, and regions. In addition, the book looks to the future of planning by addressing topics of major importance, including residual risk integration in local development plans, damage insurance and the potential role of climate vulnerability reduction credits. In many regions of the tropics, climate planning is growing but has still very low quality. This book identifies the weaknesses and proposes effective solutions.

Food production in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is exposed to climatic variations and weather-related shocks which affect agricultural output beyond the manageable limits of smallholder farmers. To manage food production uncertainties, weather index insurance (WII) pilot projects have been launched across SSA since the early 2000s. Due to low adoption rates among smallholder farmers, insurance providers have partnered with risk aggregators such as microfinance institutions to foster the demand for and uptake of WII. Despite this, demand for WWI remains low. This chapter seeks to explore the gap between the assertion, that WII is a promising risk transfer mechanism for smallholder farmers in SSA and the realisation that, even where microfinance is made available, subscription rates among smallholder farmers rarely rise. The practice of linking insurance with credit is considered to be important because, in principle, when smallholder farmers have access to insurance, they pose less risk to creditors. In this sense, insurance can crowd-in credit, the lack of which has long been identified as a major, if not the main, constraint for smallholders in developing countries.

Uninsured risk had far-reaching consequences for rural growth as well as poverty reduction. A range of informal mechanisms to insure rural households against the impact of shocks, but they are a modest component of a risk layering strategy for well-off households and even less protective for low-income households. Formal insurance mechanisms have inherent market imperfections. State interventions to address these limitations have proven costly and generally are targeted poorly. Recent developments in microfinance as well as in insurance marketing have opened new possibilities for household risk reduction. Index insurance, such as weather indexing, addresses other inherent problems in insurance by using an indicator that is not affected by individual behaviour and may address monitoring costs and moral hazard. A number of innovations using index insurance are being tried currently in diverse settings ranging from India to Mongolia to Malawi. Marketing costs may limit the provision of such insurance to small farmers, but even in such cases microfinance institutes may serve as market intermediaries. Moreover, state and submational governments can use insurance to achieve countercyclical funding programs. In this vein, municipal governments in Mexico have used insurance to finance disaster contingency while the World Food Program has insured a portion of its emergency assistance to Ethiopia. Humanitarian organizations and NGOs may also seek insurance in this manner.