Realizing Rural Resilience and Inclusive Growth by Reducing Risk: Is Agricultural Insurance the Key?

A woman tends to her vegetable garden in Koussanar, Senegal.
Credit: Fabio Bedini, WFP

Event Information

This event, jointly presented by Microlinks and Agrilinks, will discuss the potential for agricultural insurance to promote resilience and inclusive agricultural growth as part of an integrated risk management approach. Integrated risk management can provide a pathway out of poverty by mitigating climate risk and enabling smallholders to take advantage of economic growth opportunities.

Lena Heron, Senior Rural Development Advisor in USAID’s Bureau for Food Security, will discuss the use of insurance to support USAID’s inclusive, climate-smart agricultural growth and resilience programming objectives. Richard Choularton from the World Food Programme will discuss how the Rural Resilience (R4) Initiative combines agricultural index insurance with broader risk management approaches to reduce vulnerability and improve the livelihoods of rural farmers.

The R4 approach also incorporates risk reduction through community asset building (soil and water management), savings for improved coping, and credit to enable prudent risk taking for economic growth. Currently being implemented in Ethiopia and Senegal, R4 has recently begun activity in Malawi and Zambia. R4’s activities in Senegal are supported by a grant from USAID’s Global Climate Change Office. In 2014, R4 won a $500,000 grant through USAID's Internal Development Innovation Ventures (iDIV) competition, which sources game-changing ideas from USAID staff anywhere in the world.

More information on R4 is available here.

Please note that this event received a high number of registrants. We apologize in advance if this causes any problems with accessing the webinar, but we will be posting a recording of this event on this page in the next week. Please check back soon.
 
Microlinks and Agrilinks are both part of the Feed the Future Knowledge-Driven Agricultural Development project, a USAID-funded contract seeking to capture and disseminate good practice in international development around the world.

Speakers

Richard Choularton

Richard Choularton

World Food Programme

Richard Choularton is Chief of the World Food Programme's (WFP) Climate and Disaster Risk Reduction Programmes Unit. In this role, he leads WFP’s engagement on climate change and disaster risk reduction. He is also responsible for developing innovative risk management solutions targeting the most vulnerable and food insecure populations. Richard is an expert on emergency preparedness, risk financing, resilience, food security, and disaster risk reduction. Prior to his current position, he has held a number of positions in WFP, including Senior Policy Officer, Emergency Coordinator, Head of Programme, and Early Warning and Contingency Planning Officer. Richard also served as the Director of Humanitarian Assistance at a top-10 U.S. nonprofit and led early warning and decision support operations at the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET). He has an MSc in Risk, Crisis and Disaster Management.

Lena Heron

Lena Heron

USAID Bureau for Food Security

Lena Heron is the Senior Rural Development Advisor in the Bureau of Food Security (BFS) at USAID. She has been with USAID since 2000 and has conducted numerous agricultural sector assessments and designed projects to promote agricultural value chain development in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. She is the USAID Project Manager for the Assets and Market Access Collaborative Research Support Program, a virtual research facility which aims to improve the economic resiliency of the rural poor through policy-relevant research on access to and the function of markets. She also manages USAID’s engagement with the World Bank on the Agricultural Insurance Development Program and National Agricultural Risk Assessments. Lena is the Agency’s lead on risk and insurance. Her interests include resilience, rural and agricultural finance, and agricultural value chain development. As part of BFS, Lena is involved with the implementation of Feed the Future, the U.S. Government’s global food security initiative. She has been particularly engaged in the development of programming approaches to expand the participation of the poor in agricultural-led growth.

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