InsuResilience Investment Fund

About

The BlueOrchard-managed InsuResilience Investment Fund (IIF) is the first of its kind to improve access to climate insurance across the developing world. The IIF’s Debt Sub-Fund works with microfinance institutions that combines loans to micro-entrepreneurs such as smallholder farmers (women in particular) with insurance products against extreme weather events and natural disasters, protecting vulnerable rural farmers. In December 2020, the European Investment Bank (EIB) announced its investment in the IIDF Debt Sub-Fund along with a commitment that 40 per cent of the Debt Sub-Fund’s investments will be in line with the 2X Challenge Criteria, ensuring women get improved access to climate insurance.

Approach and impact

The fund seeks to integrate gender-inclusive practices across its portfolio value chains and products by encouraging collection of sex-disaggregated data, provision of educational tools and resources, and by offering gender-responsive Climate Risk Insurance (CRI) schemes which recognise women and men’s differentiated vulnerability to climate risks.

The IIF has already made six investments across emerging markets, helping to protect more than 20 million poor and vulnerable people from the effects of climate change. So far, about 75 per cent of the beneficiaries in BlueOrchard’s flagship microfinance fund are female. It has the potential to reach between 100 and 145 million beneficiaries by December 2025, as part of a wider programme by the G20 InsuResilience Global Partnership, which eventually aims to protect more than 500 million vulnerable people against the impacts of climate change.