This report summarizes the impacts of a 2014-2019 RCT spanning Mozambique and Tanzania in partnership with CIMMYT to test the impacts of bundling an innovative type of insurance with drought-tolerant maize to expand drought protection for small-scale farming families.
We paired drought-tolerant maize with index insurance designed to protect farmers when even drought-tolerant seeds fail. Only farmers using drought-tolerant seed bundled with index insurance bounced back quickly from severe shock seasons. After seeing the technologies work, they also increased their production to higher, pre-shock levels—a phenomenon we call Resilience+.
This Spotlight illustrates how MQS works with three hypothetical datasets. While two of the three contracts fail MQS, each can be improved in different ways to provide greater value to farmers.
The AMA Innovation Lab is leading a pilot in Tanzania that bundles drought-tolerant maize with index insurance for seed replacement. Adoption rates and the effective triggering and distribution of in-kind payouts suggest this bundled approach could be successfully scaled more broadly.
A randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Burkina Faso showed that farmers who purchased insurance made significantly more investments for higher future income despite implementation challenges, adding evidence for the high potential of agricultural index insurance for development.
The Global Action Network was launched with the hopes that drawing together key stakeholders and change agents could identify important gaps in knowledge or capabilities, and then innovate solutions to these problems and create resources to address them.
