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

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

World Food Programme
Lena Heron

USAID Bureau for Food Security