Piloting index insurance in Uzbekistan

09 May 2019 - In the scope of the project “Increasing climate resilience via agricultural insurance – Innovation transfer for sustainable rural development in Central Asia” (KlimALEZ), scientists of IAMO supported Uzbek GROSS Insurance in piloting an index insurance for rainfed wheat production in Uzbekistan on an experimental basis.

The term index insurance is used for a type of agricultural insurance where payouts are based not on field evaluations but rather on an index highly correlated with observed yields. These indices are usually obtained from weather stations and satellite data.

In the scope of the pilot, a selected number of farmers in Zomin district of Jizzah province purchased a rainfall based index insurance to gain experience in the development and implementation of this new type of insurance. Even though the new insurance product created high interest and demand from farmers, the number of participants and insured hectares was kept low in the first year to carefully explore opportunities and challenges under real farming conditions.

IAMO scientists Ihtiyor Bobojonov, Lena Kuhn, Sarvarbek Eltazarov and Laura Moritz participated in the product development and the identification of farmers’ demand. Furthermore, IAMO will be fulfilling the settlement agent function in the piloting process by providing an online platform on which farmers and insurance companies can control their claims depending on the rainfall amount. Thus, IAMO is transferring scientific knowledge developed in the laboratory conditions to real farming systems.