Malawi Government bought a Drought Insurance policy supported by the African Development Bank (AfDB) through its Africa Disaster Risk Financing (ADRiFi) Programme Multi-Donor Trust Fund for the 2020-2021 growing season.
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During the season, the country experienced an unprecedented dry start to the production season, leading to higher rates of sowing failure in significant parts of the southern and the central regions as modelled by Africa Risk View, the African Risk Capacity Group’s (ARC) risk modelling and early warning tool.
This, combined with mid-season erratic rainfall conditions in most parts of the country resulted in a modelled number of those affected estimated at about 6.4 million, the second-highest number of affected people, since 2001 according to a concept note by the Civil society network on climate change (CISONECC).
The organization engaged different stakeholders to a roundtable discussion on up scaling integrated Climate and Disaster risk finance and insurance (CDRFI) approaches and dialogue on transparency and accountability of the initiatives and interventions in Dowa.
CISONECC National Coordinator Julius Ng’oma pointed out that although the dialogue initiated in the past few years on climate and disaster risk financing and insurance has continued, he noted that people are yet to fully understand the concept of climate financing.
Despite the existence of the CDRFI initiative under the Multi-Actor Partnerships (MAPS) programme which has been implemented in the country over the years, little progress has been registered in bringing the desired impact.
“Moving forward, we’ve noted that still there’s very little progress in terms of bringing the change that we want, but also even amplifying such kind of initiatives so that we have more of such initiatives in the country.
“They’ve been a lot of gaps, financing is one of those, policy related issues, one of them is awareness to the general masses on the importance of CDRFI and we thought it wise that we should have this roundtable discussion with the stakeholders to be able to understand from their point of view what are some of the solutions so that maybe government and all other players who have a stake in the CDRFI initiatives can also be able to play their role and then up the game and upscale the initiatives” he explained
Ng’oma noted that Reserve Bank of Malawi’s participation as a regulator is crucial for it to provide the necessary support to the Insurance companies in offering climate and disaster risk financing related initiatives.
