Crop Insurance: The Collaborative Journey of Rabo Partnerships & Pula

Rabo Partnerships is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rabobank, the leading global cooperative bank in the food and agriculture finance space. Rabo Partnerships enriches partner Financial Institutions by providing knowledge, networks, and digital scaling solutions, enabling blended finance solutions and investments. Since 1989, it has urged financial inclusion, rural development, and access to financial services in agricultural sectors in Africa, LATAM and Asia by collaborating with local banks. Through these partnerships and by leveraging data and credit analytics solutions, RP aims to unlock over USD 1 billion in loans to smallholder farmers worldwide.

Pula is a company at the intersection of agriculture, technology, and insurance. It specializes in crafting and delivering innovative agriculture insurance and digital solutions, aiming to protect and improve smallholder farmers’ livelihoods by mitigating yield risks, enhancing farming methods, and fostering sustainable income growth. Pula operates in 19 countries across 4 continents, has insured over 11 million farmers, and boasts an extensive network that includes farmer organizations, insurance providers, and government.

The objective of this collaboration between RP and Pula is to enhance farmers’ protection in the event of yield loss and failure to repay loans, by offering Yield-based Crop Insurance to smallholder farmers. The insurance product is offered in combination with a lending product and therefore enhances protection of farmers as well as serves as a mitigation measure to unlock lending by local banks to smallholder farmers.

This collaboration unfolds with the anticipation of substantial benefits, driven by three key advantages:

• Adding crop insurance products to farmer lending programs from financial institutions will decrease the risk smallholder farmers have on crop failure because of for instance climate risk

• Credit and insurance go hand in hand and strengthen each other. With RP and Pula teaming up we have two strong players venturing in Africa

• Smallholder farmers will get access to important financial products in the formal financial system which will enable them to grow their business safely.

The success of the collaborative venture between RP and Pula hinges on the active involvement of diverse stakeholders, each playing a crucial role:

• Financial institutions: who will offer loan products bundled with crop insurance to smallholder farmers.

• Rabo Partnerships: who will support financial institutions in developing agri-focused lending programs enhanced with Data Analytics capabilities and de-risking strategies

• Pula: who will develop the insurance product and connect to the local insurance ecosystem and re-insurance companies.

• Possibly government or other organizations, NGOs: who will subsidize insurance products for smallholder farmers.

The collaboration between Rabo Partnerships and Pula will contribute to enhancing the financial inclusion of smallholder farmers and strengthening the agriculture ecosystem in emerging markets. Effectively gauging the success of the collaboration between RP and Pula involves a meticulous approach focusing on:

• The number of farmers who will take up the insurance product for their crops

• The ability of smallholder farmers to repay loans in the event of yield loss and to be in a good financial shape for the next crop season

• Reducing the Agri portfolio risk of the bank due to de-risking/mitigating yield loss insurance.