Dar es Salaam – Monday 29 July
Resolution Insurance Ltd and AGRIinsight Ltd today announce a major partnership to offer insurance to farmers using the Ubia Soko platform. The platform offers life changing resources for smallholder farmers across Tanzania, enabling them to access a range of much needed services including insurance products.
In collaboration with Dar es Salaam based Resolution Insurance, AGRIinsight is rolling out the next stages of its platform. The field application, Ubia Soko is an omni-channel platform supporting data aggregation with a combined mobile phone/internet-based service position. Farmers benefit from coordinated services, higher productivity and increased profits that allow them to save.
Yasmin Chali, Founder & Partner of Twigalpha said, “we are excited to be working with Resolution, one of the leading medical insurance providers in Tanzania. We are providing these new services through Ubia Soko that works on the vast majority of simple feature phones owned by farmers. This then allows for high penetration into rural markets and creates scale and financial sustainability for all our partners. Resolution recognises our deep knowledge of the smallholder market and we are keen to work with them to provide these types of much needed services to farmers.”
Ms. Maryanne Mugo, MD of Resolution Insurance noted that, “Access to decent health care is a daily struggle for smallholders and other rural dwellers, due to an underfunded national health system, lack of basic hospital infrastructure and a shortage of health care workers. We believe that instead of focusing on the government to provide decent medical services, our priority as the private-sector is to plug this gap and provide affordable access to high quality health care for low-income households.” She continued, “We see AGRIinsight as a key partner of ours to extend insurance to rural populations. The Ubia Soko platform with its multi-service approach is an excellent tool to help us meet our goals. Users can save money for their own health care or receive contributions from friends and relatives or other payers such as NGOs.”
AGRIinsight is taking advantage of USSD protocol to build new farmer-centric applications and adapting and applying an existing technology in a new way. The company is bringing together the Internet and USSD using application programming interfaces that can be used with web technologies. By converging these systems, the Ubia Soko platform does not need to be installed on a farmer’s phone as it runs on the network. Therefore, once the app is deployed to the network it is instantly available to every subscriber.
“The application is the first of a suite of demand driven tools being developed by AGRIinsight and its partners”, says AGRIinsight’s CEO Patrick Guyver. “We will be rolling out other applications over the next few months that focus on particular farmer and agribusiness needs.”
The market for health care in Africa is worth about US$ 35 billion.
Notes to Editor
About Resolution Insurance
Resolution Insurance is a brand trusted by individuals, families, small & medium sized entities as well as large organizations who enjoy our carefully designed insurance covers. With experience of over 15 years, Resolution has contributed significantly to the growth and development of the insurance industry in East Africa. The company underwrites all classes of general insurance (medical and all non-medical such as motor, fire, accident, travel insurance, home insurance etc.) in order to add value and be a one stop shop for their clients. Visit www.resolution.co.tz to learn more about what Resolution has to offer.
About AGRIinsight
AGRIinsight was founded in UK with a subsidiary company now operating in Dar es Salaam. The company is developing innovative technologies and business solutions to be used in emerging markets. AGRIinsight has developed an online platform and mobile applications that provide farmers and agribusinesses with a range of demand-led services including finance, insurance and related agricultural services. AGRIinsight technology works on every farmer’s low-cost feature phones, making it a powerful application that is easy to support and maintain.Visit www.agriinsight.com to learn more about AGRIinsight or follow on Twitter – @agriinsightnews