Indigenous insurance associations are a prevalent form of membership based organisations of the poor, at least in the rural areas in Ethiopia and Tanzania surveyed by the authors. Results show how villagers with few links to any formal kind of insurance market have established membership-based indigenous insurance associations to protect themselves against unexpected expenditures, mainly for funerals and hospitalisation. Many of these institutions tend to co-exist within the same community and are based on well-defined rules and regulations, well beyond informal reciprocal relations. They tend to offer premium-based insurance for funeral expenses, as well as, in many cases, other forms of insurance and credit to help address hardship. These groups are completely owned and managed by their members. They were locally initiated and have been continually developing through the actions of their own members, without involvement from the government or donors. Using detailed group membership data linked to household survey data we show that (i) these institutions are widely prevalent in the surveyed areas, (ii) households typically belong to several groups at the same time, (iii) they display a large degree of inclusiveness and (iv) they insure an important part of some shocks, but still leave households prone to the effects of risk
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford in its series QEH Working Papers with number
qehwps126.
Length: Date of creation: Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:qeh:qehwps:qehwps126
Contact details of provider: Postal: Queen Elizabeth House 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TB United Kingdom Phone: +44 (1865) 281800 Fax: +44 (1865) 281801 Email: Web page: http://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Rachel Crawford).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: