Rationale

Today, 5.4% of the African population is covered by inclusive insurance, up from 4.4% in 2011. Life products still dominate the region in terms of coverage, but the largest growth was seen in health and agriculture covers. Uganda follows more or less the same trend. Research by the Microinsurance Network showed that in 2014, 6.71% of the country’s population was covered by inclusive insurance, with life, accident and property products having the greatest outreach.

Despite this progress, the insurance industry in Uganda is still not fulfilling its potential to support economic development. While there is growing knowledge about successful inclusive insurance operations and the dos and don’ts of designing and delivering valuable insurance services to low-income households, these lessons have not been broadly adopted by Ugandan insurers. Providers often lack the skills needed to offer products that are viable for them and valuable for consumers. At the local level, training programmes are frequently unavailable and insurance institutes have limited capacity and tools to reorient insurers to the needs of the low-income market.

Purpose

The Facility collaborates with FSD Uganda in order to improve the offer of inclusive insurance in the country. It does this by building the capacity of the Insurance Institute of Uganda to offer courses on inclusive insurance to the local market. Thanks to this effort, it is expected that more than 200 insurance professionals will be exposed to state-of-the-art inclusive insurance expertise. These professionals can put this knowledge to use which in turn will benefit thousands of low-income households, enterprises and smallholder farmers.

Activities

Under the partnership, the following activities will be carried out: 

• Capacity building and certification of the local trainers of The Insurance Institute of Uganda
• Training delivery and integration of ILO training courses in the portfolio of The Insurance Institute of Uganda
• Development of a new training module (topic to be defined) in partnership with The Insurance Institute of Uganda and FSD Uganda