Insight: New Ways of Reaching The Poor

Like most organizations that provide insurance to the poor, MicroEnsure started working in partnership with microfinance organizations (MFI's). Today we have partnerships with over 60 MFI's in Africa and Asia and between them these MFI's have over 12,000,000 active borrowers. However, our experience is that these MFI's are not the only way to reach the poor; after all only around 150,000,000 families have access to a microfinance loan and there are billions of people living in poverty. MicroEnsure has been working with a number of different types of partners to reach the poor including NGO's such as CARE International and religious groups such as the Anglican Church.

When working outside the MFI's to sell voluntary insurance, the partner's brand has emerged as being an important factor in the success of the partnership. We started working with the church in India where we sold a voluntary health insurance product to families in Kerala.

The Church of Southern India owns and operates highly regarded hospitals that are used by the low income community and together we reached out to the fishing communities to sell a combined in and out patient product. We were impressed that almost 40% of our clients were not members of the church but were actually Muslims or Hindus; people trust faith based groups regardless of whether they share the same faith.

In partnership with the Anglican Church, MicroEnsure is planning to start selling health insurance to members of the church in Tanzania later this year. The product which covers malaria, maternity and diarrhea for in and out patient visits costs $40 for a family of five people and will be pilot tested in Dar es Salaam before being rolled out across Tanzania.