Summary

Risk and poverty are inextricably linked. Susceptibility to risk is a defining feature of what it means to be poor. Poor people often live in environments characterized by high weather and disease risk, and it is poor households that have the fewest tools to deal with drought, floods, and disease when they occur. Breaking the link between risk and poverty by insuring poor people both lessens the affliction of poverty and allows poor people to participate in income growth.

This set of briefs considers how to increase the tools available to poor households to manage agricultural and health risks. The focus is how to develop insurance markets, along with other financial instruments such as credit, savings, and social protection policies. The series does not document the proven impact of insurance markets for the welfare of poor people; rather, it brings together briefs written by businesspeople, policymakers, and researchers that document innovations, lessons learned, and areas of future work and action.
 

• Brief 1 - Innovations in insuring the poor : Overview
  Ruth Vagas Hill and Maximo Torero
  
  
• Brief 2 - Risk and the rural poor
  John Hoddinott
  
  
• Brief 3 - Risk, poverty and insurance
  Stefan Dercon
  
  
• Brief 4 - Microinsurance for health and agricultural risks
  Richard Leftley
  
  
• Brief 5 - Sustainability and scalability of index-based insurance for agriculture and rural livelihoods
  Ulrich Hess and Peter Hazell
  
  
• Brief 6 - Intelligent design of index insurance for smallholder farmers and pastoralists
  Michael R. Carter
  
  
• Brief 7 - Experience with weather index-based insurance in India and Malawi
  Xavier Giné
  
  
• Brief 8 - Providing weather index and indemnity insurance in Ethiopia
  Eyob Meherette
  
  
• Brief 9 - Index-based livestock insurance in Mongolia
  Olivier Mahul, Nathan Belete and Andrew Goodland
  
  
• Brief 10 - Health insurance for the rural poor
  David I. Levine
  
  
• Brief 11 - Innovations in health insurance
  Johannes Jütting
  
  
• Brief 12 - Microfinance and unexpected consumption expenditures
  Richard Hornbeck
  
  
• Brief 13 - Providing insurance through microfinance institutions
  Rupalee Ruchismita and Sona Varma
  
  
• Brief 14 - Social protection and risk
  John Hoddinott
  
  
• Brief 15 - Index insurance applied to agriculture
  Amado Villarreal González