UNDP Financial Resilience in Agriculture Community of Practice Kicks-off in India

UNDP’s Financial Resilience in Agriculture (FRA) Initiative has formally launched a Community of Practice (CoP) for government officials who are designing and implementing national agricultural insurance programs for smallholder farmers.

The first workshop of the FRA Community of Practice (CoP) has kicked-off an important peer-to-peer learning platform for leaders of national agricultural insurance agendas from 18 countries. Held on the sidelines of the International Conference on Agriculture Insurance and Agri-Financing in Goa, India, on 23rd and 24th of April 2024, CoP participants included representatives from Tanzania, Ethiopia, India, Bangladesh and Uganda - as the 5 core FRA countries. Representatives from Colombia, Ecuador, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Tchad, Viet Nam, Kenya, Senegal, China, Kenya and USA have also joined the CoP as countries with interest in future programming or with strong lessons to share.

The two-day workshop brought CoP members together to connect, share ambitions and lessons, and begin designing roadmaps for integrating agricultural insurance into national development agenda and priorities.

Key take aways:

• Conversation and debate took place between countries and technical experts on how best to financially protect farmers including policy and regulation, integration into development, action on climate, and technology and data.
• Almost all of the countries discussed deficiencies in their policy and regulatory environment for the financial protection and insurance of farmers.
• Many countries highlighted how markets have developed through fragmented and unsustainable pilots driven by both private and development sectors.
• Scaling up sustainability was a critical area for discussion, with a strong focus on how development actors could work with industry and government to deliver what one stakeholder alone can not. An agreement was made, that UNDP will work with participating countries to create a learning agenda to inform advocacy and insurance market development.
• Discussion of India's investments in their large-scale agricultural initiative - the PMFBY - provided an excellent foundation for exchange on how a single successful mechanism can change the landscape for farmers in many countries,
• The Indian government is eager to work alongside the FRA in many other countries, sharing lessons technologies and capacities.
• A strong agreement on two areas of future focus was agreed by all parties: 1) ensuring this CoP becomes a living, breathing vehicle for countries working to widen the financial protection of farmers, and 2) a commitment from many to repeat the convening in 2025, with ambitions to grow, feature more discussions with donors, philanthropic organisations and the private sector, as well as from insurers and the value chain players.

Lessons, technical discussions and peer learning will be shared by CoP members, summarized and published to facilitate broader knowledge sharing and advocacy – sign up to the IRFF newsletter to stay updated.

About UNDP’s Financial Resilience in Agriculture Initiative

Financial Resilience in Agriculture (FRA) is a new initiative led by UNDP's Insurance and Risk Finance Facility and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It will be officially launched in September 2024, but has commenced working with public and private partners in 5 core countries - India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda.

Through the design and implementation of innovative national agricultural insurance programs, FRA aims to bolster smallholder farmers’ financial resilience and accelerate the pace of adaptation to climate change.

The initiative’s unique market systems approach is to address market failures that prevented agricultural insurance programmes from reaching scale and focus on building sustainable business models for actors from the inclusive insurance ecosystem. To achieve this, the work is guided by three building blocks considered foundational to developing well-functioning agricultural insurance markets:

1. Enabling Environment
2. Market Foundations, and
3. Innovation Models.

Invitation to read and share feedback with the UNDP FRA team

UNDP’s Financial Resilience in Agriculture (FRA) solutions are dependent on collaborative and ambitious action. The UNDP Insurance and Risk Finance Facility (IRFF) team invites feedback and comments on all matters in the following consultation paper. UNDP will consider all feedback received by 15th August 2024.