PIA ADVOCATES FOR DROUGHTDRIVEN INSURANCE PLAN
THE Pensions and Insurance Authority (PIA) has encouraged insuretech to apply for the 2024 BimaLab Africa Accelerator Programme which provides support to high-impact startups that improve the resilience of underserved and climate-vulnerable societies.
PIA believed that Insurtechs could develop solutions that would lower the cost of distribution and reach uninsured or underserved people in remote areas who could not access traditional indemnity, highcost insurance.
This is according to the PIA Communications Manager, Doreen Silungwe, in an interview.
Ms Silungwe said innovative, affordable, and growing high-impact insurance could be critical drivers of inclusive societal resilience, delivering essential products and services to Africa’s poor and rural populations.
This, she pointed out, was a good opportunity for innovators in the insuretech space as it presents a unique innovative business, delivering social and commercial value to the insurance industry.
“We are encouraging insuretech to apply as this offers them a platform to elevate their start up within this space.
“Recent shocks such as the drought that we are facing has highlighted more starkly than ever before the vulnerability of low-income households in facing multi-hazards shocks in Africa,” she said.
Ms Silungwe, however, observed that insuretechs faced challenges getting into the insurance space due to various challenges.
She noted that the BimaLab programme was therefore set up to address challenges that insurtechs were facing such as lack of technical capacity, access to funding, access to strategic partnerships, and regulatory barriers.
“In 2024, Bimalab apart from creating an enabling environment for insurance fostering innovation, growth and strategic partnerships, it will be mainstreaming gender into its programme, ensuring that women-led insurtechs are enabled to apply to the cohort and supported to succeed once selected,” she said.
According to Ms Silungwe, the learning journey would also explicitly focus on supporting insurtechs to understand and design for women clients, addressing the gender insurance gap in Africa and targeting this untapped market.
She explained that the goal of the BimaLab Insurtech Accelerator Programme was to create insurtech innovation ecosystem focused on supporting growth of insurtechs.
Other goals of the programme were to create an inclusive and enabling regulatory environment, improve customer value, and reaching underserved markets, particularly women, households and communities that are inherently unprotected.
The BimaLab Africa Accelerator Programme 2024 programme is working with 25 businesses at MVP and post-revenue stage, from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Somalia, Tunisia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Egypt, and Morocco, in the acceleration track.