Overview
I am blogging from the Heathrow Sheraton now preparing to head home later today. Our last day of the trip related to Africa was yesterday, and it was a fitting end. Time will tell, but it was quite likely the most important meeting we had for making this project into a long term program with outcomes for ISU, our students, and faculty. More details in a moment.
I will be reviewing overall blog and making some edits on names, spellings, and accuracy but I will preserve the observations I was making along the way as I actually saw them. I now have a clearer understanding, and some of the perspectives I had at the time were...,let's say, limited. I now see things more clearly and I would like to change some of what I said to make my observations appear more informed. But I think it is important to recognize that there each day we are learning (or should be) new ideas and gaining new perspectives that change our paradigms, our beliefs.
I am blogging from the Heathrow Sheraton now preparing to head home later today. Our last day of the trip related to Africa was yesterday, and it was a fitting end. Time will tell, but it was quite likely the most important meeting we had for making this project into a long term program with outcomes for ISU, our students, and faculty. More details in a moment.
I will be reviewing overall blog and making some edits on names, spellings, and accuracy but I will preserve the observations I was making along the way as I actually saw them. I now have a clearer understanding, and some of the perspectives I had at the time were...,let's say, limited. I now see things more clearly and I would like to change some of what I said to make my observations appear more informed. But I think it is important to recognize that there each day we are learning (or should be) new ideas and gaining new perspectives that change our paradigms, our beliefs.
I think it is easy to think that what we believe now is what we have always believed. But if we are honest with ourselves we would see how much our core beliefs have changed over time, as we gain new perspectives. In Ghana they have a word Sankofa (literally meaning "go back and take"). It teaches the wisdom in learning from the past in order to build for the future. I think that to remain true to what I felt at the time is important. If I make any edits for the purpose of clarification now, I will note that it came at a different time.
I am grateful that I had a colleague, Horace, there with me. I think that made my observations more objective. Every evening we sat down and debriefed the days events, sometimes for several hours over dinner.
I hope that these blogs challenged some of the things you may have thought about Africa. That it is technologically in the stone age, or that they are all poor and in constant need of of a handout from those of us living in rich countries. Or that we have nothing to learn from them. I hope that people will see the fallacies of those assumptions as they read through my blogs, and see the photos I posted.
I already miss Ghana. It truly is a place of where modern meets traditional. A place where cultures blend, almost seamlessly. My favorite photo illustrating this was the photo of an Islamic man, in a thatched-roof village outside of Tamale, sitting on a motorcyle, with his cell phone in hand. I miss the places we saw, the food we ate, and especially the friends we made. I am comforted by a line from Frederick Beuchner's book "Telling the Truth" it reads:
You can kiss your friends and family good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your ear, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world, but a world lives in you. I can honestly say, Ghana lives in me now.
If you want to find out more about the topic of microinsurance please see our Katie School wiki
at http://www.katiepedia.com/ and search under the topic of microinsurance. I keep that updated with research and papers on the topic. I have gotten good feedback on the You Tube videos that I posted on Day 12 on Ecotourism and Day 8 on the value of microfinance for women in Ghana.
Day 12- Baobab Financial Services http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOcIdw61j1Q
Day 8- Larabanga Ecotourism http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9THYjEVEC4
Day 8- Larabanga Ecotourism http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9THYjEVEC4
Here is the blog from yesterday.
One Stop to Go
We finally left Accra at around 11 p.m. headed for London. We ate a nice dinner on the plane, love British Airway meals, and then tried to get some sleep. We arrived at London at around 7 a.m. and then got a bus for Cheltenham, which is about two hours outside of London, to the home office of Microensure http://www.microensure.com/.
The history of Microensure was that it was established in 2005, as Microinsurance Agency (MIA) , the insurance agency of the international microfinance organization Opportunity International, a faith-based non-profit headquartered in Oak Brook, IL
They have packaged life and non-life microinsurance products in Ghana and have microinsurance operations in numerous developing countries. They successfully provided microinsurance in Uganda, and worked with World Bank in financing a weather-indexed insurance product for Malawi. MicroEnsure acts as a broker between regulated local insurers, reinsurers, and microfinance organizations and the farmers who purchase the insurance. They currently work with 40 different microfinance organizations, including their founding organization, Opportunity International. They provide product development, and the IT back office support for loan and insurance applications, and claims payment information for insurers and reinsurers. They see there role as helping to make sure that the insurance is affordable for the bottom billion (people who can only pay a few dollars a year).
One of the other key concepts that they relayed to us was that the best thing that microinsurance was doing was moving the risk from local people to the international reinsurance market, which can more easily spread and diversify the risk. I see the value of this, and I wonder how to work that concept with the risk retention concept I considered in earlier blog re. Agogo region. Figuring out how to integrate those two will be on my mind for some time, I suspect.
MicroEnsure recently received $24.5 million from the Gates Foundation for the purpose of faciliatating microinsurance, and weather-indexed crop insurance around the world. They have an office in Accra and are working on developing products for Ghana, including indexed insurance for crop loss.
We compared notes and reassuredly found that we had several similar findings. We both saw the importance of helping the agricultural sector because so much of the population (over 70 percent) somehow rely on that sector. We also agreed that the most important part of addressing this sector is to get farmers more credit. As mentioned in earlier blogs, banks and microfinance institutions are reluctant to expand their loan portfolios to include morefarm loans, as the are currently viewed as risky.
We discussed their approach and strategy, which was a bit different than what we were considering (I feel like I shouldn't go into too much detail on that publicly as I am not sure what they considered public information) but the result would be the same, greater willingness to provide credit for farmers.They have had success with their approach in other countries, so it may very well work out in Ghana. They certainly have the resources to overcome many challenges, and in fact have a good track record of doing just that in Malawi and India.
After about two hours of sharing observations and brainstorming ideas we came to the conclusion that we really should be working together. There are things we can be doing at ISU to support them and they have a lot to offer ISU, including providing data to help accelerate our research and development of student and faculty involvement in microinsurance, including student internships and study abroad programs to Ghana. We see a role for our students in helping with the pilots they run. This includes, the needs analysis, helping with initial product development ideas, providing education about insurance to farmers (and others) in Ghana. There would also be a number of projects students (agribusiness and actuarial science) could conduct on campus. In short, this could be an enormous win-win for both organizations.
On our way home from Cheltenham, we had the simultaneously feelings of being completely wrung out and exhilirated.
It was a long journey in many ways. One that I will never forget.
We finally left Accra at around 11 p.m. headed for London. We ate a nice dinner on the plane, love British Airway meals, and then tried to get some sleep. We arrived at London at around 7 a.m. and then got a bus for Cheltenham, which is about two hours outside of London, to the home office of Microensure http://www.microensure.com/.
The history of Microensure was that it was established in 2005, as Microinsurance Agency (MIA) , the insurance agency of the international microfinance organization Opportunity International, a faith-based non-profit headquartered in Oak Brook, IL
They have packaged life and non-life microinsurance products in Ghana and have microinsurance operations in numerous developing countries. They successfully provided microinsurance in Uganda, and worked with World Bank in financing a weather-indexed insurance product for Malawi. MicroEnsure acts as a broker between regulated local insurers, reinsurers, and microfinance organizations and the farmers who purchase the insurance. They currently work with 40 different microfinance organizations, including their founding organization, Opportunity International. They provide product development, and the IT back office support for loan and insurance applications, and claims payment information for insurers and reinsurers. They see there role as helping to make sure that the insurance is affordable for the bottom billion (people who can only pay a few dollars a year).
One of the other key concepts that they relayed to us was that the best thing that microinsurance was doing was moving the risk from local people to the international reinsurance market, which can more easily spread and diversify the risk. I see the value of this, and I wonder how to work that concept with the risk retention concept I considered in earlier blog re. Agogo region. Figuring out how to integrate those two will be on my mind for some time, I suspect.
MicroEnsure recently received $24.5 million from the Gates Foundation for the purpose of faciliatating microinsurance, and weather-indexed crop insurance around the world. They have an office in Accra and are working on developing products for Ghana, including indexed insurance for crop loss.
We compared notes and reassuredly found that we had several similar findings. We both saw the importance of helping the agricultural sector because so much of the population (over 70 percent) somehow rely on that sector. We also agreed that the most important part of addressing this sector is to get farmers more credit. As mentioned in earlier blogs, banks and microfinance institutions are reluctant to expand their loan portfolios to include morefarm loans, as the are currently viewed as risky.
We discussed their approach and strategy, which was a bit different than what we were considering (I feel like I shouldn't go into too much detail on that publicly as I am not sure what they considered public information) but the result would be the same, greater willingness to provide credit for farmers.They have had success with their approach in other countries, so it may very well work out in Ghana. They certainly have the resources to overcome many challenges, and in fact have a good track record of doing just that in Malawi and India.
After about two hours of sharing observations and brainstorming ideas we came to the conclusion that we really should be working together. There are things we can be doing at ISU to support them and they have a lot to offer ISU, including providing data to help accelerate our research and development of student and faculty involvement in microinsurance, including student internships and study abroad programs to Ghana. We see a role for our students in helping with the pilots they run. This includes, the needs analysis, helping with initial product development ideas, providing education about insurance to farmers (and others) in Ghana. There would also be a number of projects students (agribusiness and actuarial science) could conduct on campus. In short, this could be an enormous win-win for both organizations.
On our way home from Cheltenham, we had the simultaneously feelings of being completely wrung out and exhilirated.
It was a long journey in many ways. One that I will never forget.
Faithfully Submitted,
Jim
Jim
