Rural Risk Management Ethiopia

Abstract

This document investigates prospects for the use of index based weather insurance in Ethiopia for commercial and semi-commercial farmers. The document first summarizes the impact of risk weather risk in particular on Ethiopian agriculture and the need to balance investments in weather risk mitigation and weather risk management. Because the focus of this document is on risk management in the face of potential weather shocks, this introduction is followed by a summary of the traditional risk-transfer tool available for managing agricultural weather risk, multi-peril crop insurance. It outlines the limitations of this approach in the Ethiopian context. Finally, the first section of the paper provides an overview of the index based weather insurance product, which is the focus of the remainder of the document. Narrowing its scope to the potential use of index based weather insurance products in Ethiopia, the research discusses whether the prerequisites or enabling conditions for this type of product exist and whether there are any major impediments to developing a weather insurance program in the country. It was determined that the major pre-requisites for a pilot program appeared to be in place. The research took a project implementation approach to determining the technical feasibility of this type of program, despite some misgivings about scalability.