Women in emerging economies are far more likely than men to be excluded from formal financial services and are disproportionately impacted by poor health and climate change. This double-whammy of greater risk and weaker protection leaves women – many of whom work in the informal economy or in climate-vulnerable sectors such as subsistence farming – urgently in need of risk management tools.
In an effort to address these imbalances, the Access to Insurance Initiative (A2ii), in partnership with the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC), is running the Empowering supervisors to improve women’s access to insurance initiative. As the recent Public Dialogue on Women’s Access to Insurance heard, “It is essential to design products that meet women’s specific needs and raise awareness of the transformative potential of gendered approaches in regulation and supervision. Promoting women’s access to insurance will also contribute to the achievement of broader policy objectives and the sustainable development goals, particularly SDG 5: Gender Equality.” Over the 14- month programme, A2ii aims to raise awareness and to encourage regulators and supervisors to come up with innovative solutions.
“We want to provide insurance supervisors with the knowledge and tools they need to create framework conditions that facilitate better access to high quality insurance for women,” says Hannah Grant, Head of the A2ii Secretariat. “This also implies empowering women supervisors to take on increased responsibility within their authority and act as gender role models.”
A2ii’s gender equality programme covers four broad areas:
The research programme has already resulted in a new report, The Role of Insurance Supervisors in Boosting Women’s Access to Insurance, due to be published soon. New insights into how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted women’s access to insurance – and the response of supervisors – are also in the pipeline. At the same time, A2ii is taking steps to mainstream gender into all its core activities and is developing a strategy to “systematically integrate a gender lens into the A2ii annual work plan, including all training, events, and publications.” Advocacy includes raising the profile of gender-sensitive insurance through the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) and its new internal diversity and inclusion work stream.
The training component encompasses providing scholarships to Women’s World Banking’s (WWB) Leadership Programme and follow-up coaching for supervisors, with a focus on women’s access to insurance and the empowerment of women insurance supervisors as leaders. From last year’s cohort, one WWB scholarship holder from the Philippines Insurance Commission is developing health and other insurance products aimed at single mothers, while supervisors from Ghana and the CIMA region are encouraging insurance products for women-led nano and micro businesses.
“Insurance supervisors have a key role to play in developing insurance products geared towards women,” says Hannah. “They can boost women’s access to insurance by collecting and using gender-disaggregated data from both the demand and supply sides. This data can then be used to track progress on inclusive access, inform evidence-based policymaking, and highlight the business case for serving the women’s market, which has high growth potential.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has added even more urgency to A2ii’s programme. “The economic fallout of the global pandemic has disproportionally affected women,” she adds. “Even before the pandemic, women were much less likely than men to be economically active.”
Removing barriers to women’s full participation in the economy is key. Among the solutions, A2ii identifies closing the gender-disaggregated insurance data gap; encouraging the use of gender-disaggregated insurance data; adapting consumer protection measures to address gender-differential risks; and integrating gender dimensions into national financial inclusion strategies (NFIS) and other national financial and insurance literacy strategies.
Empowering women working in the informal economy is a major challenge. “For a start, we need to know here women are actually working, and we need to understand their work-related insurance needs better. Regulators can help by providing, for example, standardised definitions of women-owned MSMEs to support portfolio analysis. Insurance regulators could also require insurers to gather data such as size of business, number of employees and whether it is owned or managed by women. This would help the development of products with businesswomen in mind,” says Hannah.
It’s not all bad news. As A2ii’s first gender report looking at role of supervisors points out, “in some jurisdictions, evidence suggests that women are more likely to take out insurance compared to men, partly attributed to their higher interest in such forms of risk mitigation… In Ghana, the majority of microinsurance clients are self-employed women in the informal sector.”
“More work needs to be done on gender-disaggregated data to truly unearth this,” observes Hannah. “Women are typically more risk-averse and more concerned about their families’ needs, and as a result they want to do something about it. Can we turn the conventional wisdom on its head? Are women actually more likely to have insurance?”
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you offer more accessible products designed with women in mind, then more women will want them. Examples such as WWB’s Caregiver health insurance in Jordan, or VimoSEWA’s bundled life, health, and property insurance in India are specifically designed and distributed with women in mind. VimoSEWA employs an all-female sales force who put women clients at ease. “It’s not just the product, but also how you sell it, how you communicate about it, how you service it. All of this has to be customised to the targeted women clients and their socio-economic contexts,” says Hannah.
Coupled with the recently launched B20 special initiative on Women’s Empowerment – which seeks to address the challenges that women face in accessing financial services – A2ii’s ambitious programme has the potential to inject some much-needed urgency into removing women’s barriers to insurance.