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.   

It is extremely expensive to do business in cash around Vanuatu. Moving cash between islands to maintain liquidity is a burden for financial service providers, and traveling to the nearest bank or post office for Ni-Vanuatu is both time consuming and costly. However with emerging technologies there is no longer any reason to incur these costs, and more efficient systems will enable financial services to penetrate even father outside the boundaries of urbanized areas.

In the Solomon Islands, as elsewhere in the Pacific region, other less appropriate rural finance models have been tried and failed, despite research indicating a high demand for basic savings products coupled with a strong existing culture of saving non-cash resources. As such, there is reason to believe that the Solomon Islands provide a fertile environment for establishing Savings Groups (SGs) to provide access to financial services in rural, underserved markets.

Provides brief description of financial inclusion in Solomon Islands, highlighting opportunities for intervention, and the importance of a national action plan to coordinate stakeholders and prioritize resources.

This note is an analysis of Fiji's Micro Finance Institutions. It looks at five out of the ten Institutions currently operating in Fiji to better understand the history, the current position and future outlook for micro finance in the country.