Leadway Assurance partners AGRA to strengthen climate resilience insurance scheme

Leadway Assurance partners AGRA to strengthen climate resilience insurance scheme

BY OLAIDE SHITTU

In a step towards deepening agricultural resilience across Nigeria, Leadway Assurance Company Limited has entered into a strategic partnership with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) through a $399,900 grant initiative to implement the “Building Farmers’ Resilience through Innovative Insurance Models and Financial Instruments” project.

AGRA is an African institution supporting inclusive agricultural transformation and sustainable food systems. This three-year initiative, running from March 2025 to March 2028, aims to transform the livelihoods of 21,000 smallholder farmers (SHFs) across Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Niger States.

Climate change continues to escalate risks for Nigerian farmers, manifesting in unpredictable rainfall, prolonged droughts, extremely high lethal temperatures and increased crop failure. This volatility threatens national food security/systems and undermines years of agricultural progress.

Recognising the scale of this challenge, Leadway Assurance has taken a bold step forward, championing innovative risk management strategies tailored to the realities of rural agriculture.

At the heart of the new intervention is the “Pay at Harvest” insurance scheme, an innovative premium collection model that enables farmers to defer insurance payments until after harvest, when liquidity is more assured. This approach lowers the financial barriers to insurance enrollment, increases uptake among SHFs, and embeds resilience within the agricultural value chain.

“Pay at Harvest” empowers farmers to protect their livelihoods without upfront costs, ensuring they can bounce back from climate-related losses and secure credit, inputs, and market access with greater confidence.

This new grant builds upon Leadway Assurance’s successful three-year partnership with Heifer International, under which over 60,000 smallholder farmers benefited from the “Pay at Harvest” model. The current AGRA-funded and sponsored project goes a step further by offering a more holistic package, including access to off-takers and market linkages, extension services and climate-smart agronomy support, digital mapping of farmlands for enhanced monitoring and accountability, timely early warning systems for extreme weather events, scalable farmer education programs to promote financial literacy and climate-smart practices, and expanding public-private collaborations for unlocking innovative finance, including green climate finance, for crop insurance.