Adoption and impact of credit-linked crop index insurance: a case study in Mali

Abstract

Linking insurance with credit is a promising approach towards overcoming the main difficulties of scaling up crop insurance in Africa. The current research revealed that credit-linked crop insurance adopters in Mali were on average larger households than non-adopters, were living more often from subsistence agriculture, were less patient and less likely to produce maize, while operating on smaller farms. However, propensity score matching revealed that changes in terms of production decisions or wellbeing were limited compared to credit-users. To achieve scaling, linking crop insurance with credit should not only be beneficial for banks to limit their exposure (on a mandatory basis), but should become beneficial as well for smallholders (in terms of better access to credit, lower interest rates or less required collateral).