Nairobi, Kenya, April 22, 2013—IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, announced that a Kenyan partner of the Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF), a program managed by IFC and jointly implemented with IBRD, reached a major milestone in April 2013 in improving income security for 100,000 farmers by providing them with insurance against adverse weather.

 

The milestone was reached through the work of Kilimo Salama, a social enterprise launched by the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture with the support of GIIF. Started with only 185 farmers in Kenya in 2009, Kilimo Salama allowed farmers to insure as little as a bag of seeds, and its agricultural insurance program was the first in the world to reach smallholder farmers using mobile technologies. Today it has insures 60,000 farmers in Kenya, and 40,000 farmers in Rwanda.