Weather Index-Based Insurance in Fiji: Brief on Initial Scoping
This focus notes looks at the possibility of weather index-based insurance in Fiji, which has been used in many developing countries to provide affordable insurance products to low income farmers.
With as much as 80% of the population of some countries in the Pacific involved in agriculture, there is a potential for a product that could provide some form of coverage in the case of failure of crops. Such an insurance product would have to be affordable as well as accessible to farmers in rural areas. Given the low levels of income earned by these farmers, traditional agriculture based insurance products would be too expensive to meet these requirements.
Microinsurance is a product designed to give low-income households coverage for life events in exchange for a low cost premium. While microinsurance is touted as the fastest growing microfinance product in the world, it has yet to be developed successfully in the Pacific.
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