Blog

In a world of greater unpredictability and climate impacts, insurance can be a challenging product to deploy. Forward-thinking regulators, policymakers, and supervisors are changing their tactics, ensuring insurance can be a tool for inclusion. In a recent event bringing together alumni from Women’s World Banking’s Leadership and Diversity Program for Regulators (LDR), forward-thinking government institutions shared how they are approaching inclusive insurance. The session was sponsored and co-hosted by the Centre of Excellence on Gender-Smart Solutions, an initiative under the Global Shield against Climate Risks, and Access to Insurance Initiative (A2ii).

Today, on International Women's Day, A2ii is launching the FeMa-Meter, a tool for collecting sex-disaggregated data across two categories: access to and use of insurance, and organisational diversity. The tool helps collect key insurance indicators and provides immediately a quick analysis. The tool is targeted at insurance supervisors and regulators, policymakers, and insurance companies.

To be able to provide well-designed insurance solutions that address the needs of the low-income and excluded customers in a manner that is customer friendly but also economically sustainable, calls for innovation - i.e. to do new things or to do things differently.

Katherine Miles and Manoj Pandey are the authors of the recent A2ii report 'The Role of Insurance Supervisors in Boosting Women’s Access to Insurance'. The report outlines the potential of women’s insurance and the regulatory and supervisory approaches that have the potential to facilitate women's access to inclusive insurance, improving financial resilience and advancing the cause of gender equality. 

On this International Women's Day, you would likely have read or heard it said that women represent the majority of uninsured in the world. This is widely accepted and is most likely the truth too. Though why do we say it's most likely the truth? We say so because we don’t have the data. We don't have any comprehensive data set on women's access to insurance, both on demand or the supply.