Rationale

It is not possible to have meaningful social and economic development without insurance. Yet the insurance industry in many Asian countries is not fulfilling its potential to support economic development.

The Asian microinsurance sector has recently experienced tremendous growth with the number of people and properties covered by microinsurance growing. Despite this exponential growth, the percentage of the total population covered is only 4.3% in Asia compared to 4.4% in Africa and 7.6% in Latin America, hence improvements are still needed to provide valuable insurance products to millions of households.

Moreover, many questions remain about the design and delivery of relevant insurance services for the low-income market.  Insurers and distribution channels such as banks and MFIs often struggle to design and deliver products that are relevant for low income workers, often repeating the same mistakes. Further large multinational insurers struggle with rigid internal and reporting structures may find it difficult to experiment with new innovative solutions that are required to serve this market.

To continue learning from market leaders, the Facility partnered with AXA’s Emerging Customer team to address specific learning questions.

Purpose

This partnership between the ILO’s Impact Insurance Facility and AXA’s Emerging Customers team aims to design and deliver impact insurance innovation to benefit low-income workers, especially women and migrants in Indonesia. The key output of this collaboration will be critical insights into the design and delivery of insurance products for excluded populations, especially women and migrants, which will be widely shared with the insurance and development communities. To achieve this result, the ILO and AXA will test relevant insurance products in Indonesia and share the resulting lessons and experiences.

Activities

Activities include the following:

• Provide innovation management support and place an Impact Insurance Fellow with one of the AXA country offices to support project management and implementation of the designed solutions in jointly identified markets
• Foster peer-to-peer learning and capacity building of other providers within AXA ‘s network in order to promote the application of lessons learnt on this project in other countries 
• Provide strategic advice to AXA’s emerging customer’s strategy and targeted insights on specific evolutions in the inclusive insurance market