Crowdsourcing for better insurance

Crowdsourcing for better insurance

Act today is a world project in Colombia that aims to fight hunger by increasing climate knowledge in six countries that are particularly dependent on agriculture and vulnerable to climate variability and change: Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Senegal and Vietnam.

ACToday works with national partners to develop sophisticated forecast systems and new climate services tailored for agriculture, enabling the World Bank and WFP to significant scale They provide affordable indexed insurance to more than 1 million farmers in multiple countries.

To provide more smallholder farmers with protective insurance, ACTToday begins testing mobile in 2021 Crowdsourced applications It draws on the farmers’ own experiences and memories.

“We know from decades of work that index insurance programs cannot scale successfully without incorporating farmers into the design process,” said Daniel Osgood, head of insurance work at ACToday.

Farmers help improve the underlying index of the insurance they buy. If a poorly designed index does not reflect the actual situation accurately enough, farmers may not receive insurance payouts when they deserve it. Not only does this create unnecessary hardship, it also damages the credibility of the insurance plan.

“We asked farmers what they’ve been through over the past few years and what they’ve experienced in the current season to see how that matches up with the climate data we get from weather stations, satellites and forecasts,” Osgood said.

“If they agree, we know we can safely use our insurance model to help farmers in times of drought. If they don’t, we work to find out why and fix the problem as best we can.”

Ultimately, this process results in a more reliable index, which leads to more trust and community support for insurance.

ACToday’s insurance team knew that even in the absence of a global pandemic, information on tens of thousands of farmers in six project countries would not be available through traditional face-to-face community visits.

“This bottom-up approach has never worked at scale before. We never had a framework that would allow millions of local people to drive a decision on a project designed to benefit them – and it’s still entirely science-based .” — Daniel Osgood, IRI

So they developed a mobile-based game to replace it, and in 2021 they ran a trial run with about 200 Colombian coffee farmers.Participating farmers were asked questions such as [translated from Spanish]:

“Guess which year was worse based on most of your neighbors and satellite and rain gauge datasets: [Year 1] or [Year 2]? “

Once they choose, the game tells them the answer and then asks the same question in different years. The game is designed in such a way that farmers can learn which years are the worst based on official records, and researchers can learn which years show major divergences between farmers and historical records.

While a full analysis of the results won’t be available until later in 2022, the initial signs are very encouraging. For example, the game was widely shared among farmers, who played an average of 200 rounds (compare 200 pairs of years) over the four days the pilot lasted. The team will expand the game to Guatemala and other ACToday countries in 2022.

The mobile game is part of a series of new ACToday crowdsourcing technologies that have recently been successfully piloted globally for projects reaching millions of people.

“It’s exciting that this bottom-up approach has never worked at scale before,” Osgood said. “We’ve never had a framework that would allow millions of local people to drive decisions on a project designed to benefit them – and it’s still entirely science-based. It’s like artificial intelligence, but it’s really human intelligence or community intelligent.”

the story is originally published Columbia Climate Institute International Institute for Climate and Society.