Financial Protection: Agriculture

Poverty remains a predominantly rural problem, with a majority of the world’s poor located in rural areas1 and engaged in agricultural practices. Agriculture is a risky business, and a large shock can be especially devastating for poor households. One approach to building rural resilience and smoothing shocks suffered by the rural poor is to promote agricultural insurance. But few pilot agricultural insurance schemes have scaled up successfully; hence insurance has had little impact on the resilience of rural livelihoods. Experience suggests that sustainable, scaled-up agricultural insurance programs should be based on an equal partnership between the public and private sectors. The DRFIP, through its through its work on agriculture aims to support client countries in implementing sustainable, cost‐ effective public-private partnerships in agricultural insurance, with the larger goal of increasing rural households’ financial resilience.