Innovation for agricultural climate risk insurance: household survey preliminary report

This publication reports on the Innovation for African Climate Risk Insurance (InACRI) project, which aims to develop an improved crop insurance product that addresses the problem of basis risk inter alia for small scale farmers. The project targets small scale maize farmers in Meru County. In order to improve the current poor performance and uptake of index-based crop insurance products in Kenya, the project is implementing a study,  in three phases, to assess farmers' needs and willingness to pay for agricultural insurance.

The first phase entailed a reconnaissance exercise including focus group discussions with maize farmers and experts, to gather contextual details on our study area identifying the main agricultural (climate) risks to the farmers, approximating awareness about insurance, and identifying barriers to scaling out crop insurance. The second phase entailed a household survey. The third phase involves an experiment to elicit farmers’ willingness to pay for crop insurance. The fourth phase will entail piloting an insurance cover for maize, based on the findings from the farmer needs assessment and willingness to pay experiment. This document is a preliminary report of the findings from the first two phases: the reconnaissance exercise and the household survey.