The Anglican Health Network (AHN) is using the network of Anglican churches, health programs and hospitals to create a micro-insurance program covering the health needs of people in developing countries. Oxfam America is experimenting with a crop insurance program for hundreds of farmers in Tigray Province in northern Ethiopia.
Episcopal News Service reports:
Based in Geneva, AHN announced October 6 that it will establish a new pilot project to test the concept of providing a ‘micro health insurance plan’ in an African setting. The AHN was established at the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in May 2009.
Its key ambition is to support Anglican health providers to improve health care in the developing world. “In an era when faith communities have been rediscovered as key health services providers, we are pleased to be leading this innovative approach to low income health care” said the Rev. Paul Holley, president and co-founder of AHN.
The introduction of micro health insurance schemes is a recent development of the micro finance movement. Micro finance channels have already been utilized to provide life, funeral and crop insurance to low income populations. Micro health insurance extends that evolution further by offering affordable health services. It allows whole communities to pool the financial risks of illness and accident and improve their access to a higher standard of health care. However, low cost health insurance is a challenging arrangement, which relies on minimal administration and efficient inter-relationships with health care providers. AHN believes that the distribution of Anglican parishes and health facilities will offer a unique structure on which to base a successful scheme, which could potentially cover widespread populations.
The Boston Globe reports on a program started by Oxfam America to help farmers in an experimental program to ensure that Ethopian farmers won’t starve should the seasonal rains once again fail to materialize.
A quarter-century after famine killed one million Ethiopians and seared the world’s conscience, peasant farmers there are enduring an ever-faster barrage of droughts. Nearly 14 million people in Ethiopia are going hungry this year.
Those poor rains would not be fatal for American farmers, who have elaborate crop insurance programs to protect them in dry years. But such risk protection has been unthinkable in Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries.
Now, however, thanks to the innovative work of Oxfam America, the Boston-based global development organization, the risks are no longer as severe for hundreds of farmers in Tigray Province in northern Ethiopia. If the rains fail and their crops wither, their losses will be covered. And they won’t starve.
Villagers have flocked to sign up for the trial farm insurance program since it was launched early this year. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, Oxfam America has made drought insurance available for the first time to about 200 households, 38 percent of them headed by women.
The success of the pilot initiative prompted Oxfam America and Swiss Re to commit last month to sharply expand the project, from just one village to five more, with a new Rockefeller grant of $565,000.
The health insurance pilot project will be tried first in the Diocese of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in partnership with MicroEnsure, a U.K.-based micro-insurance program. Micro Ensure describes themselves on their web-site in this way:
We reach out to large numbers of the poor with low-cost insurance products designed to match their needs. At the same time, we negotiate with insurance companies on behalf of our clients to keep premiums to a minimum. Our aim is to achieve sustainability for insurance companies, product distributors, and clients.
In order to distribute our products effectively, we seek to work in partnership with organizations that are currently serving the poor such as microfinance organizations, rural banks and SACCO’s, as well as humanitarian organizations that are providing non-financial services. In addition, we serve other social aggregators including trade unions, professional associations, and faith-based networks
ENS says that Dar es Salaam also has a range of public, and private health care providers, a supportive regulatory structure for non-profit health insurance and the strong support of the Anglican Church in Tanzania.