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| Title | Protecting the Poor - A Microinsurance Compendium |
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| Author | Churchill, C (Editor), Munich Re, CGAP, ILO |
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| Content Language | English (en) |
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| Document Type | Book |
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| Date Of Publication | 2006 |
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| Description | The book notes upfront that by helping low-income households manage risk, microinsurance can assist them to maintain a sense of financial confidence even in the face of significant vulnerability. It brings together the latest thinking of leading academics, actuaries, and insurance and development professionals in the microinsurance field to offer a practical, wide-ranging resource which provides a thorough overview of the subject to date.
The book allows readers to benefit from the lessons learned from a project launched by the CGAP Working Group on Microinsurance analysing operations around the world. It is aimed at insurance professionals, practitioners and anyone involved with offering insurance to low-income persons, this volume covers the many aspects of microinsurance in detail including product design, marketing, premium collection and governance.
It also discusses the various institutional arrangements available for delivery such as the community-based approach, insurance companies owned by networks of savings and credit cooperatives and microfinance institutions. The roles of key stakeholders are also explored and the book offers insightful strategies for achieving the right balance between coverage, costs and price.
This book is organized into six parts. The first part, Principles and Practices, defines microinsurance, provides insights into the risk-management needs of low-income households and explains the critical social protection function of microinsurance. Part 2 summarizes lessons about specific types of products, namely health insurance, long-term life insurance and short-term insurance linked to savings and credit products. This part also explores the adaptation of insurance products to address the characteristics of women and children.
The third part of the book explores microinsurance operations in detail. It includes chapters on product design, marketing, premium collection, claims, pricing, financial and risk management, governance, organizational development and loss control. It concludes with a chapter on benchmarking that examines performance ratios of the microinsurance schemes. Microinsurance can be delivered through a variety of institutional arrangements. Part 4 examines these arrangements to analyse the conditions in which one might be preferable to the others. These chapters consider the partner-agent model, the community-based approach, insurance companies owned by networks of savings and credit cooperatives, retailers as distribution channels, and microfinance institutions. One chapter analyses the advantages, disadvantages and conflicts of interests of various organizational arrangements for delivering health insurance.
Part 5 assesses the roles of key stakeholders, including donors, regulators, governments, insurers and reinsurers, and technical assistance providers. The book concludes with Part 6, which summarizes the strategies needed to achieve the right balance between coverage, costs and price, and provides an outlook on future developments in microinsurance.
The book can be downloaded either in its entirety or just selected chapters. |
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| Publisher | International Labour Office |
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| Number of Pages | 678 pp |
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| Series ID | 2006 |
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| Keywords | INSURANCE, POVERTY, MICROINSURANCE, RISK, VULNERABILITY |
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document (EN)
