What is the primary focus of the International Conference on Inclusive Insurance?

The conference focuses on expanding access to insurance for underserved populations and enhancing financial resilience, particularly in emerging markets.

International Conference on Inclusive Insurance 2026

Name: International Conference on Inclusive Insurance 2026
Start: 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z
Location: Kigali

Oct 19–23, 2026Kigali, RwandaIn-person

Registration open

The International Conference on Inclusive Insurance is a pivotal gathering dedicated to advancing the accessibility and effectiveness of insurance solutions for underserved populations globally. Hosted in Kigali, Rwanda, this event serves as a critical forum for stakeholders to exchange knowledge, foster collaborations, and devise strategies aimed at bolstering financial resilience, particularly within emerging economies. The conference brings together a diverse group of participants, including policymakers, industry leaders, academics, and development practitioners. It is designed to facilitate robust discussions on innovative approaches, regulatory frameworks, and technological advancements that can drive the expansion of inclusive insurance markets. The overarching goal is to ensure that more individuals and communities, especially those vulnerable to economic shocks, can benefit from appropriate insurance coverage.

Committees & topics

Topics
Business Models for Inclusive Insurance · Digital Solutions for Inclusive Insurance · Health and Hospital Cash Insurance · Funeral Insurance and Family Financial Protection on Death of the Breadwinner · Micro Pensions and Old-Age Income Security · The Role of Microfinance Institutions and Savings and Credit Cooperatives · Coping with Climate and Disaster Risks · Understanding Demand and Customer Needs

Why it matters

Inclusive insurance is fundamental to global development and poverty reduction efforts. By providing financial protection against unforeseen events such as natural disasters, health crises, and economic downturns, it enables individuals and households to maintain stability, invest in their futures, and avoid falling into deeper poverty. This conference directly addresses the challenge of extending these vital protections to populations traditionally excluded from formal insurance markets.

The discussions and outcomes from this conference have far-reaching implications. They influence policy decisions, shape product development, and encourage the adoption of best practices that can significantly impact the lives of millions. The focus on emerging markets underscores the importance of tailored solutions that consider local contexts, cultural nuances, and specific risk profiles. Furthermore, the collaborative environment fosters partnerships that are essential for scaling up successful initiatives and overcoming systemic barriers to financial inclusion. The insights gained here contribute to a more resilient and equitable global financial landscape, aligning with broader sustainable development goals.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for the International Conference on Inclusive Insurance should focus on understanding the diverse motivations of various stakeholders involved in the inclusive insurance ecosystem. This includes not only the obvious actors like insurers and regulators but also the often-overlooked 'hidden stakeholders' such such as community leaders, local distributors, and technology providers. A thorough 'stakeholder workshop' can help identify these groups and their respective interests.

Effective participation will require a nuanced approach to 'engagement strategies', considering the varied cultural and economic contexts represented at the conference. Attendees should be prepared to discuss how different models of inclusive insurance have performed in various regions, drawing on examples from countries like India, the Philippines, and Kenya. Furthermore, understanding the 'gender dynamics across cultures' is crucial, as women often face unique barriers and opportunities in accessing and benefiting from insurance products. A 'dynamic analysis' of market trends and regulatory environments will also be beneficial for contributing meaningfully to the discussions.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Rwanda

Host nation with a strong interest in leveraging inclusive insurance for economic development and resilience.

Role in topic

As the host country, Rwanda showcases its commitment to financial inclusion and provides a relevant context for discussions on developing effective inclusive insurance markets in Africa. Its experiences can offer valuable lessons for other emerging economies.

India

Pioneer in microinsurance and digital financial services, with significant experience in scaling inclusive insurance.

Role in topic

India has extensive experience in developing and implementing large-scale inclusive insurance programs, particularly in rural areas and for low-income populations. Its innovations in leveraging technology and agent networks are often cited as best practices.

Kenya

Leader in mobile-enabled insurance solutions and agricultural insurance in Africa.

Role in topic

Kenya is recognized for its innovative use of mobile technology to deliver insurance products, especially in agriculture and health. Its regulatory environment has also been conducive to experimentation and growth in the inclusive insurance sector.

Germany

Key supporter and funder of inclusive insurance initiatives through development agencies and foundations.

Role in topic

Germany, through organizations like the Munich Re Foundation, plays a significant role in supporting research, capacity building, and pilot projects in inclusive insurance globally. It often contributes expertise in risk management and actuarial science.

South Africa

Advanced inclusive insurance market in Africa with a focus on regulatory innovation and consumer protection.

Role in topic

South Africa has a relatively mature inclusive insurance market and offers insights into regulatory approaches that balance innovation with consumer protection. Its experiences with diverse product offerings for different income segments are valuable.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Business Models for Inclusive Insurance

Inclusive insurance — the provision of risk protection products to low-income and previously underserved populations — emerged from the microinsurance movement of the late 1990s and 2000s, when organizations such as the ILO's Microinsurance Innovation Facility, the Munich Re Foundation, and the Microinsurance Network began documenting how commercial insurers, mutuals, and cooperatives could profitably serve clients earning a few dollars a day. Early pilots in India, the Philippines, Ghana, and Peru demonstrated that traditional agent-based distribution was too costly for small premiums, pushing the sector to experiment with partner-agent models, embedded insurance via mobile network operators, and bundling with credit or agricultural inputs. The central tension in business model design remains balancing scale, viability, and client value. Many early schemes achieved scale through mandatory bundling but produced low claims ratios and poor consumer outcomes, prompting regulators and the IAIS (International Association of Insurance Supervisors) to issue guidance on proportionate regulation and on key performance indicators for inclusive insurance. Today, models range from fully digital MGAs, to bancassurance with microfinance lenders, to community-based mutuals and government-subsidized mass schemes such as India's PMJJBY and PMSBY. The unresolved questions concern unit economics in small markets, the role of public subsidy, and how to align distributor incentives with renewal and claims performance rather than first-sale commissions.

Key players

Digital Solutions for Inclusive Insurance

The diffusion of mobile phones across low- and middle-income countries since the mid-2000s transformed the economics of inclusive insurance. Mobile network operators in East and West Africa — beginning with Trustco/Tigo in Ghana and later Safaricom in Kenya — demonstrated that airtime-funded or premium-deducted life cover could enroll millions in months, while platforms such as BIMA, MicroEnsure (now MIC Global), and aYo built region-spanning digital underwriting and claims infrastructures. Insurtechs have since extended this to parametric weather products, telematics-based motor cover, and embedded health products distributed via e-commerce and ride-hailing apps. Digitalization has, however, exposed new fault lines. Regulators are grappling with consumer protection issues around opaque enrollment, dormant policies, and grievance redress in app-based environments; the IAIS and Access to Insurance Initiative (A2ii) have issued guidance on supervising digital and innovative business models. Data-protection regimes — from the EU GDPR's extraterritorial reach to India's DPDP Act and Africa's growing patchwork — increasingly shape what alternative-data underwriting is permissible. The current debate concerns how to harness AI-driven claims automation, open-finance APIs, and digital identity systems (such as India's Aadhaar or modular DPI stacks promoted by the Global Digital Compact) without re-creating exclusion or eroding trust.

Key players

Health and Hospital Cash Insurance

Out-of-pocket health spending remains the single largest cause of catastrophic household expenditure in low- and middle-income countries, with the WHO estimating that roughly half a billion people are pushed into or further into poverty by health costs each year. Hospital cash products — which pay a fixed daily indemnity for inpatient stays rather than reimbursing medical bills — emerged as an inclusive insurance response because they are simple to underwrite, easy to communicate, and require no provider network. They proliferated in India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and East Africa during the 2010s, often bundled with microcredit or distributed via MNOs. The broader question is how private hospital-cash and outpatient products fit alongside national health financing reforms aimed at Universal Health Coverage (SDG 3.8). Critics note that indemnity products do not address provider quality or the affordability of care itself, while proponents argue they fill liquidity gaps that public insurance — such as India's PM-JAY, Indonesia's JKN, or the Philippines' PhilHealth — does not cover, particularly for income loss, transport, and outpatient costs. Recent debates within the IAIS, ILO, and WHO have focused on regulatory treatment of hybrid products, the role of community-based health insurance (notably in Rwanda and Ethiopia), and how digital claims verification can curb fraud without excluding informal-sector clients.

Key players

Funeral Insurance and Family Financial Protection on Death of the Breadwinner

Funeral and life-of-breadwinner cover is historically the most demanded inclusive insurance product, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America and South Asia, where funeral rites carry strong social obligations and the death of a primary earner is a leading cause of household impoverishment. Informal burial societies — South Africa's stokvels, Ethiopia's iddir, and Indonesia's arisan-linked groups — have provided this function for over a century, and modern funeral insurance evolved from formalizing these mutual arrangements. South Africa alone has tens of millions of funeral policies in force, regulated under a distinct microinsurance license since 2018. The contemporary policy debate focuses on consumer protection, intermediation costs, and the line between assistance business and life insurance. Cases of mis-selling, unauthorized parlour-led schemes, and excessive commissions have prompted regulators in South Africa, Kenya, Zambia, and Mexico to tighten conduct rules. Simultaneously, MNO-embedded life cover — typically a small lump sum on the death of the policyholder — has expanded family-level protection to tens of millions across Africa and South Asia at very low premiums. The unresolved issues are how to raise sums insured to economically meaningful levels, how to ensure beneficiary identification and rapid claims payment, and how to integrate these products with broader social protection floors envisaged under ILO Recommendation 202.

Key players

Micro Pensions and Old-Age Income Security

More than three-quarters of the world's informal-sector workers — street vendors, farmers, domestic workers, gig workers — have no contributory pension coverage, a gap the ILO and ISSA have flagged as one of the defining social protection challenges of the coming decades. Micro pensions emerged in the 2000s as voluntary, defined-contribution savings products designed for irregular incomes, low minimum contributions, and mobile-enabled deposits. Early flagship schemes include India's NPS-Lite and later Atal Pension Yojana, Ghana's tier-3 informal sector schemes, Kenya's Mbao Pension Plan, and various MFI-linked programs in Bangladesh and the Philippines. The core dispute is over architecture and incentives. Pure voluntary schemes have generally struggled to achieve scale without matching contributions, tax incentives, or auto-enrollment, while state-subsidized schemes face fiscal sustainability questions as cohorts age. The 2025 G20 discussions on aging and informal-sector protection, alongside ILO World Social Protection Reports, have pushed the agenda toward portable, digitally administered accounts linked to national ID and payment rails. Outstanding questions include investment governance of small balances, decumulation design (lump sum vs. annuity), and the interaction with non-contributory social pensions, which several jurisdictions now treat as the foundation of old-age income security.

Key players

The Role of Microfinance Institutions and Savings and Credit Cooperatives

MFIs and SACCOs are, alongside MNOs, the most important distribution channels for inclusive insurance. Microfinance institutions — descended from Grameen Bank, BRAC, and the Latin American commercial microcredit tradition — first embedded credit-life cover in their loan books in the 1990s to protect portfolios from borrower death, and later expanded into voluntary health, life, and asset products for clients. SACCOs and credit unions, organized globally through WOCCU and ICMIF, similarly leverage member trust and deduction-at-source mechanisms to distribute cooperative insurance, with particularly deep penetration in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, the Philippines, and Colombia. These channels offer advantages — existing client relationships, regular contact, and aligned mission — but also pose risks. Mandatory credit-life products have historically suffered from inflated premiums, low claims ratios, and weak claims communication to bereaved families, prompting regulatory action in markets including South Africa, Mexico, and Cambodia. The current agenda concerns moving MFIs and SACCOs from compulsory product tying toward genuinely client-centric voluntary offerings, strengthening their supervisory treatment (the IAIS, AFI, and CGAP have issued relevant guidance), and exploiting their data to underwrite parametric and health products. Sector consolidation, over-indebtedness, and post-COVID portfolio stress have added urgency.

Key players

Coping with Climate and Disaster Risks

Climate change is now the defining macro-risk for inclusive insurance. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report and successive UNDRR Global Assessment Reports document rising frequency and severity of droughts, floods, cyclones, and heatwaves disproportionately affecting low-income populations in tropical and coastal regions. Insurance responses have evolved from indemnity-based crop schemes — historically expensive and prone to adverse selection — toward parametric and index-based products that pay out on objective triggers such as rainfall deficits, wind speed, or satellite-measured vegetation indices. Pioneering programs include India's PMFBY, Kenya's Kenya Livestock Insurance Programme, the African Risk Capacity sovereign pool, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, and the Pacific PCRIC. The political economy is shaped by the InsuResilience Global Partnership (launched at COP23) and the V20 group of climate-vulnerable economies, which have pushed for the Global Shield against Climate Risks announced at COP27 in 2022 to channel pre-arranged finance and insurance to vulnerable countries. Debates center on the role of insurance within the UNFCCC Loss and Damage architecture, the sustainability of premium subsidies, basis risk in parametric products, and how to integrate insurance with anticipatory action, social protection, and disaster risk reduction. Reinsurers warn of growing protection gaps and rising premiums as climate losses accelerate.

Key players

Understanding Demand and Customer Needs

A persistent finding across two decades of inclusive insurance research is that supply has run ahead of demand: products have often been designed around insurer capabilities and regulatory categories rather than the actual risk priorities, mental models, and cash-flow patterns of low-income households. Landmark demand studies — including the FinScope surveys across Africa, FinMark Trust's mass-market diagnostics, MicroSave's customer research, and the Cenfri/A2ii consumer research programs — show that funeral and life cover consistently rank highest in stated demand, while crop, livestock, and health needs are large but harder to translate into purchase. Trust deficits, prior negative experiences with claims, and weak insurance literacy systematically depress uptake even where products are technically affordable. The field has accordingly shifted toward human-centered design, behavioral economics, and value-for-money metrics championed by the Microinsurance Network's Landscape studies, the ILO's Impact Insurance Facility, and CGAP. Key debates concern how to measure client value beyond enrollment numbers (claims ratios, renewal rates, complaints, net promoter scores), how to design for women — who make up a disproportionate share of underserved clients and are the focus of dedicated initiatives such as the Women's World Banking insurance work — and how digital channels can erode trust through opaque enrollment as easily as they build it through fast claims payment. Demand-side subsidies and bundling with social protection registries are increasingly seen as essential to closing protection gaps.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Conference on Inclusive Insurance 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Mifepristone Ruling Sparks 2026 Political Tug

Europe's June Heatwave: Infrastructure Crisis

Mifepristone Case Revives Abortion Politics

Democrats Push SCOTUS to Protect Abortion Pil

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Understanding Motivations

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Rwanda October 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

International Conference on Inclusive Insurance 2026

Oct 19–23, 2026Kigali, RwandaIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Business Models for Inclusive Insurance · Digital Solutions for Inclusive Insurance · Health and Hospital Cash Insurance · Funeral Insurance and Family Financial Protection on Death of the Breadwinner · Micro Pensions and Old-Age Income Security · The Role of Microfinance Institutions and Savings and Credit Cooperatives · Coping with Climate and Disaster Risks · Understanding Demand and Customer Needs

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Rwanda

Host nation with a strong interest in leveraging inclusive insurance for economic development and resilience.

Role in topic

India

Pioneer in microinsurance and digital financial services, with significant experience in scaling inclusive insurance.

Role in topic

Kenya

Leader in mobile-enabled insurance solutions and agricultural insurance in Africa.

Role in topic

Germany

Key supporter and funder of inclusive insurance initiatives through development agencies and foundations.

Role in topic

South Africa

Advanced inclusive insurance market in Africa with a focus on regulatory innovation and consumer protection.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Business Models for Inclusive Insurance

Key players

Digital Solutions for Inclusive Insurance

Key players

Health and Hospital Cash Insurance

Key players

Funeral Insurance and Family Financial Protection on Death of the Breadwinner

Key players

Micro Pensions and Old-Age Income Security

Key players

The Role of Microfinance Institutions and Savings and Credit Cooperatives

Key players

Coping with Climate and Disaster Risks

Key players

Understanding Demand and Customer Needs

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Conference on Inclusive Insurance 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Mifepristone Ruling Sparks 2026 Political Tug

Europe's June Heatwave: Infrastructure Crisis

Mifepristone Case Revives Abortion Politics

Democrats Push SCOTUS to Protect Abortion Pil

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Understanding Motivations

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Rwanda October 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

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Frequently asked questions