The Grameen Crédit Agricole Foundation will conduct a new technical assistance program to develop microinsurance in rural areas.

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The Grameen Crédit Agricole Foundation receives a new technical assistance grant of €900,000 from PROPARCO to facilitate access to insurance products for rural communities.

Insurance products are tools for protecting individuals against a range of risks, particularly those related to illness or natural disasters. They are drivers of economic development and social well-being. Yet, the insurance penetration rate in Africa is less than 21%. To address this, it is essential to ensure the sustainability of insurance products for people excluded from traditional insurance markets.

New technical assistance program: training microfinance institutions in microinsurance

The Grameen Crédit Agricole Foundation receives a technical assistance grant of €900,000 from PROPARCO, a subsidiary of the group AFD, in order to set up a micro-insurance program with theInternational Labour Organization (ILO).

This new technical assistance program will enable the Foundation to train and support these partner microfinance institutions so they can add new insurance services to their products, including agricultural insurance. Their clients, vulnerable people often excluded from insurance products (low-income households, women, smallholder farmers, microenterprises, and small and medium-sized enterprises), will thus be better protected and able to increase their resilience to climate, economic, and health shocks.

The Grameen Crédit Agricole Foundation will be able to draw on the program's expertise Impact Insurance ILO to develop this program and train nearly a dozen partner microfinance institutions in Africa and Southeast Asia.

At the end of 2020, the Foundation had already obtained a €10 million guarantee from the AFD Group to support its partner institutions in sub-Saharan Africa during the Covid-19 crisis. This guarantee, as well as this grant, are part of the long-standing partnership developed between the Foundation and AFD/PROPARCO since 2013 with the launch of the African Facility program which expires at the end of December 2021.

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More information on the Foundation's technical assistance offer: //www.gca-foundation.org/our-technical-assistance-system/