Martínez said the local insurance company is excited about moving forward with the new financial tools, and so are other institutions. Osgood said this process makes it much more possible for these local and national institutions to sustain the project’s innovations after donor money is gone. “Participatory processes have always been a big component of our work, but this is on a whole new level,” said Osgood. Osgood credits this deeper, integrated involvement with the success of the project. In Honduras, they’ve worked with local university researchers, the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, insurance companies and the Comisión Nacional de Bancos y Seguros-the country’s insurance regulator. Most of the activities there have been funded by the CGIAR’s Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security ( CCAFS).ĭan Osgood, the team’s lead economist, said that the CCAFS mandate calls for working with local partners from the beginning of the project, and in such a way that everyone is involved with the scientific process of the project, not just the logistics or the administrative components. Martínez leads activities in Latin America and the Caribbean-the team also has projects in Africa and Asia-and has been working in Honduras since 2014. Government leaders in other countries are calling and asking if their country can be next. When a project is over, the team hopes that farmers can buy an affordable insurance product that’s offered and managed by local and national institutions. The team’s goal is to co-create with farmers a crop insurance product designed to financially protect the farmers during severe drought, particularly in places where farmers wouldn’t otherwise have access to an insurance product. The activities were one component of an ongoing effort by the team that combines behavioral economics, agricultural science, and satellite data science. The farmers went through a simulation of multiple seasons, making various decisions related to a theoretical insurance product during each round. The sessions used a ratio of one orange ball to four white ones to represent the probability (here, 1 in 5) that an insurance-triggering drought would occur in a given season. Martínez, a member of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society’s Financial Instruments Sector team, was facilitating ten sessions with farmer groups in southern Honduras over the course of a week. The scene above took place in early May 2015. The ball is white, Martínez says, which means there is no insurance payment for this round of the game. She blindly pulls a ball out of the hat and hands it to Martinez, who holds it up for the room to see. Her long dark hair is pulled back into a low pile, and she’s also dressed up, wearing a spaghetti strap dress with chunky-heeled sandals. The farmer to which Martínez extends the sombrero is one of two women in attendance. More flowers-roses, lilies and daisies made of plastic and cloth-surround the podium-sized altar, which is draped by a light blue cloth printed with the 23rd Psalm, in Spanish. Bright red crepe paper wraps the church’s wooden rafters, punctuated by paper flowers in yellow, green and white. Most of the farmers gathered in the church are men, many of them dressed for a business occasion, not fieldwork, in collared shirts and dress shoes. About a dozen or so other farmers have also shown up for today’s activity in a one-room church in the community of Aldea de Agua Morada, in southern Honduras. She extends the hat to a farmer seated on a pew. Sofia Martínez holds a sombrero upside down, rattling the five ping-pong balls contained inside. Play Ball! Interactive games help design & test new insurance products
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