Built Before the Storm: How Disaster Finance Is Redefining Resilience

But product design is only half the battle.

The other half is trust.

And that requires meeting people where they are through messengers they already believe in.

So how you move it from the boardrooms, the meeting rooms where we talk about all the insurance companies down, is what we've done is engaging at the local level.

So the people that we call community mobilizers, the people that reach out to these people, are people that they know.

Religious leaders, teachers, are people that own kiosks, people that they know every day.

But they're not just telling them insurance.

They're introducing them to opening bank accounts.

They're introducing them to better seeds.

So you create a whole better solution and better value proposition.

then you can ensure if there's no drought, you get paid kind of thing.

But the other thing that has really worked for us is because mobile penetration is done pretty well on the continent, just embedding within that.

So within hours, they're able to see money in their pockets.

And Zepre has been deliberate about who benefits.

In farming and herding communities, livestock is gendered.

Men typically own cattle, while women own smaller animals like goats and sheep.

A program that only covers cattle inadvertently excludes women.

In the programs we run, the biggest one being DRIVE, 55% of our beneficiaries are women.

But we had to be very intentional because women own mostly smaller animals, the goats.

We made a focus on that because if you go for the cows alone, mainly the men own the cows.

But if you also make sure that you're mobilizing around the smaller animals, then you get more women.