Micheal Ajayi
As part of its plans to develop crop insurance solution in the country, Leadway Assurance Company Limited has gone in partnership with Flour Mills of Nigeria Limited.
Speaking on this development, Head, Agric and Micro Insurance who is also the National Coordinator, Leadway Assurance, Mr. Ayoola Fatona said bags of fertilisers produced by Flour Mills, Nigeria comes with an area yield crops insurance product.
He explained that farmers who purchase the brand of fertiliser and register for such will automatically have insurance covers on their crop farms.
The scheme has compensation such that if a loss occurs during the planting season, insured farmers will get a replacement fertiliser to assist them to plant during the next planting season.
The Assurance Company said the strategy was to distribute crop insurance products to rural farmers through crop input manufacturers, as this would create an additional incentive for them to sign up for insurance coverage.
“This product was deployed on a proof-of- conceptualizing basis during the 2018 wet season farming programme in Kaduna and Kano states with rice, maize, soya beans and sorghum as the pilot crops.
“In all, over 1,000 rural farmers signed up for insurance during this pilot programme, with 12 of them receiving replacement fertiliser from Leadway Assurance and Flour Mills of Nigeria as compensation for loss suffered on their farms,” Fatona said.
In it’s bid to further develop this scheme Leadway, said it would take it to other states of the federation during the in-coming 2019 wet season farming with the expectation that over 200,000 farmers would sign up for insurance during the period.
The insurance firm reiterated its commitment to increasing the resilience of rural farming households to climate-related and national disasters using innovative and technology-driven insurance solutions.
