Design Parametric Crop Insurance That Nigerian Farmers Will Actually Buy

The National Agricultural Insurance Corporation has existed since 1987. Nigerian smallholders still do not buy crop insurance. The reasons are well documented: complex claims processes, frequent disputes over loss assessment, payments that arrive months after they are needed, and premiums that are too high relative to demonstrated reliability. Parametric insurance — paying automatically when rainfall or temperature crosses a defined threshold, without requiring a field assessment — solves the first three problems. The premium problem requires a different design approach. Your challenge is to design a parametric crop insurance product for Nigerian smallholder farmers growing one crop in one region. It must use publicly available satellite weather data to trigger payments, pay within 72 hours of a trigger event, be sold via existing mobile money accounts without a physical agent, and price premiums below 5% of expected crop value per season. Submit a product design document (max 12 pages) including: the crop and region chosen, the trigger parameters and data source, the payment calculation methodology, the mobile money sales and claims flow, how basis risk is minimised, the reinsurance strategy, and a pilot plan reaching 10,000 farmers. Judging criteria: 40% technical design of trigger and payment mechanism, 30% premium pricing and reinsurance model, 20% sales channel design, 10% pilot plan.