The Facility's activities

The Facility provides grants to support organisations to develop innovations in the microinsurance sector. See our Innovation grants section for more information. Click also on the Innovation grantees to get an overview of the projects grantees are implementing, and how these are intended to benefit the working poor. The CCB Programme offers a range of customized services to support microinsurance consultants and providers to deliver value to the poor. See also our CCB projects.

Knowledge update

• Bite Sized Lessons

  Product diversification to improve outreach

  In order to improve the outreach of mutual insurance organizations, CIDR decided to diversify beyond the common family health product. One of the innovative products introduced was a school health product that covers health risks of children while at school, and is designed to meet the needs of the schools and parents. The product meets parents' needs by providing a guarantee that their children will be taken care off when at schools. CIDR believes the product is valued as 80 per cent of the schools renewed the product after the first year of operation, and it was expanded to 16 other schools in year two, covering a total of 3,500 children. The claim ratio was 43 per cent in year one and 37 per cent in year two, though CIDR expects it to increase as the familiarity with the product increases. CIDR continues to monitor the performance of the product and has conducted surveys to assess client satisfaction; results will be out in the coming months. For more on CIDR, see their Learning Journey.

• Publication

  Third-party payment mechanisms in health microinsurance: Practical tips and solutions - (pdf 1,03 MB)

  Briefing note nº11, ILO, October 2011
  The third-party payment (TPP) mechanism is a model where insured patients are not required to pay the cost of health services covered by the insurance at the time the services are rendered. While the TTP (also called "cashless") mechanism is not new in health insurance, setting up and managing a TPP mechanism for a health microinsurance scheme presents unique challenges. This paper draws on the experience of various health microinsurance schemes and presents the pros and cons of using a TPP mechanism. It also presents key issues to address when establishing and managing a TPP mechanism, as well as tips and solutions collected from cases studies and experts' interviews.

Feature story

Moving beyond credit life insurance - (pdf 380 KB)

A vast majority of microinsurance programs at microfinance financial institutions (MFIs) start with offering some sort of credit life coverage, which stands as the most common product offered to low-income households. It is a logical starting point as it is easy for MFIs and insurers to introduce. However, credit life still doesn't bring, from the client value perspective, enough value and there is great scope for improvement. A way to increase credit life value for low-income people is to expand coverage to include additional risks.

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