March 9th, 2021

B4IG Incubator – Insurance Net for Smallholders

L’Oreal and AXA teamed up to enhance smallholder farmers’ resilience to risk.

Smallholder farmers around the world are vulnerable to the risks associated with hazardous meteorological events or unexpected health problems and they are often excluded from financial and insurance services. This lack of security net puts them at risk of falling into poverty. The Insurance Net for Smallholders (INES) project has been designed to reduce this vulnerability, by offering AXA’s inclusive crop loss insurance and health insurance products to farmers in L’Oréal’s strategic raw material supply chains. The cost is fairly distributed across the value chain and insurance is provided to beneficiaries with simplified procedures and guarantees adapted to the needs of smallholders.

By 2025, the objective is to cover 80,000 farmers and their families and also to generate gains in supply chain stability to validate the investment in the program for L’Oréal and its partners.

With a clear vision in mind, the project team was able to make the following achievements during their participation in the acceleration program:

The accelerator program helped to coordinate L’Oréal’s and AXA’s approaches to build resilience for smallholders. ​During the program, the two companies partnered to run an assessment of the needs of farmers producing guar in India and shea in Burkina Faso and developed tailored insurance products, which will be tested in 2021. The teams also worked on a business model with the potential to be economically sustainable and replicated in other geographies. ​Furthermore, contacts with B4IG companies were established to scale the model developed by L’Oréal and AXA.

The next step is to launch a test of the insurance solution in the two projects.

2022-12-20T15:06:08+01:00
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