Forum: ICT enabling rural financial services and micro-insurance for smallholders

Join this discussion from 20 to 31 May 2013.

Smallholder farmers are the world’s largest group of working-age poor. Much of the world’s food supply depends on their efforts, yet a lack of financial services often stymies their attempts to make productivity-enhancing investments and to smooth their consumption between periods of plenty and scarcity. Capital-constrained farmers minimize risk instead of maximizing return.
 
Studies have identified four kinds of financial services that farmers need to achieve their economic goals: credit, savings, transfer and payment facilities, and insurance.
 
ICT has created the potential to deliver a greater diversity of financial products to greater numbers of rural clients than conventional financial service providers have been able to reach. ICT can also enhance the government’s capacity to monitor and evaluate financial services provided to rural clients and design effective financial policies and regulations for the rural sector. [Source: ICT in Agriculture Sourcebook module 7.]
 
In discussion with our subject matter experts, we will identify innovative practices that use ICT to enable rural financial services and micro-insurance; and, learn about ICT-related challenges and what is being done to address these.
 
Subject Matter Experts
   Ron Bielens, consultant
   Anita Campion, Founder, AZMJ
   Saleh Gashua, Secretary General, AFRACA
   Juliet Kyokunda, Microinsurance Agency
   Calvin Miller, Senior Rural Finance Officer, FAO
   Won-Sik Noh, Secretary General, APRACA
   Maria Pagura, Senior Program Officer, World Bank
   Michael Tarazi, Senior Policy Specialist, CGAP
   Roger Thomas Moyes, consultant, World Bank
 
This is the 6th forum in a series of online discussions being organized by the World Bank and FAO, and hosted in the e-Agriculture platform. The forum builds on Module 7 of the ICT in Agriculture Sourcebook.

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