ABSTRACT
In 2007, while working with Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) and the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), we were asked to join an interdisciplinary team on a project that would create a microinsurance program for farmers in Malawi. The insurance companies and banks offering the insurance were concerned that farmers would misunderstand the concepts involved, and so one of our roles was to show that farmers understood the program. To this end, we developed a communication tool to share the ideas of the program with farmers, many of whom were illiterate. Once on the ground in Malawi, we recognized that some farmers easily understood the core concept of insurance and also the details of microinsurance, with payout depending on the amount of rainfall measured at specific locations. Others required more exposure to the idea through training. Overall, the farmers were quick to learn. One farmer stood up and began using the communication tool to explain it to his colleagues. In a later project in Ethiopia, farmers suggested that insuring their irrigation structure 2 would be a very good thing to do—and they used the English term insurance, which they had not heard before, to describe the way the dam’s irrigated water already protects them from drought. Although farmers were unfamiliar with several of the central ideas in the contracts, including rain gauges and the contractual division of the growing season, they were eager to learn about them, and many asked for rain gauges for their own fields.
