Our blog
Featured Blogs
The World Bank Crisis & Disaster Risk Finance team (CDRF) at the Finance, Competitiveness & Innovation (FCI) Global Practice has put in place a technical assistance program on Crisis Risk Finance Analytics (CRFA) which leverages innovative analytics at global, country, and project levels to create an enabling environment for improved risk financing and risk management. The program is funded by Global Risk Financing Facility (GRiF) and is under the joint technical partnership between the World...
During a recent training session about The Role of Financial Market Solutions for Building Resilience to Shocks in Agriculture, we asked a simple question to a group of policy makers and private sector players: “Which financial services do you think play a role in boosting rural resilience?” To our surprise, while participants were given the possibility to select several answers, many of them chose only one: insurance. With several years of combined experience on the development of agricultural...
Climate shocks and natural disasters have long-lasting effects — human, social, economic, and environmental. Managing them is a key challenge, from a financial standpoint as much as any other, for governments across the globe. Funding recovery or reconstruction in the aftermath of a disaster relies on solid, private, financial markets. These capital and reinsurance markets offer financing options to help governments diversify the cost of risk away from their own economies. In having a disaster...
Developments in satellite technology, remote sensing, and big data allow us to collect an unprecedented amount of valuable information. Antoine Bavandi, a Senior Financial Sector Specialist at the World Bank Group’s Crisis and Disaster Risk Finance team, talks about how this can be leveraged to address emerging and complex risks. This video illustrates three practical examples of how large-scale satellite-data applications can help improve financial resilience and benefit the world’s most...
Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in the heart of the Sahel region, was already facing difficult challenges when the COVID-19 outbreak occurred. The security context had been deteriorating since June 2018, with an upsurge in violent attacks by terrorists and criminal groups. The country is now experiencing a rapidly growing crisis in internally displaced persons (IDPs); the number of IDPs increased from 50,000 in January 2019 to over 1 million in August 2020. The country is also facing a food...
Over the last decade, the World Bank’s Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance Program (DRFIP) has worked with low- and middle-income countries to build their financial resilience to disasters which contributes to the World Bank’s twin goals of poverty reduction and shared prosperity. To help a country become more financially resilient to the risks it faces, we first consider what the risks are, how likely they are to materialize, and what social and economic losses they would cause. We can answer...
The mountain Kingdom of Lesotho like many countries is no stranger to disasters. The landlocked small state of 2.2 million people is continually buffeted by multiple shocks, primarily drought but also flooding, frost, hail and storms. The country was in the throes of responding to a catastrophic drought as the COVID-19 coronavirus insipidly yet inevitably advanced into Sub-Saharan Africa in February 2020. This drought was so severe that the UN said it was ‘one step away from famine’ -...