By Irina Hauler and Abiodun Salako
Women smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa are holding up a food system under pressure. They make up nearly half (49 percent) of the total workforce in the agribusiness sector (FAO, 2023); however, they own less of the land, control less of the income, and access little of the financial safety nets that could protect them when the rains fail, the floods come, or the harvest disappears overnight. This contradiction is part of the major conversations pushed to the forefront of climate finance today: the exclusion of women from climate risk insurance. Fewer than 3% of smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa are covered by agricultural insurance (GSMA, 2020). This is not a niche problem. With over 110 million people in Africa affected by weather, climate, and water-related hazards in 2022 (WMO, 2025) and 64 percent of people in the region experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity in 2024 (FAO, 2025), gender considerations need to be mainstreamed into climate risk insurance as a matter of both equity and effectiveness.
The barriers are structural
Climate and Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance (CDRFI) is vital for strengthening resilience to climate-related shocks. However, a lack of consideration for gender and intersecting vulnerabilities limit its effectiveness. It is tempting to frame the low uptake of insurance among women farmers through the lenses of low financial literacy or cultural resistance. What’s apparent is that the systems themselves were never built with women in mind.
Women typically have fewer productive assets and lower or more irregular cash income than their male counterparts all of which makes meeting insurance premium payments harder. But, aside affordability, the distribution channels used to sell insurance products are themselves misaligned with women’s realities. Insurance is often sold through agri-dealers, banks, or mobile platforms that women access less easily where products exist and women are aware of them, they may not control the household phone, the bank account, or the purchasing decision. In households not headed by women, insurance enrollment can require a permission structure that excludes them.
Product design is where gender bias becomes most consequential. Many climate risk insurance schemes are built around formal agricultural assets and cash crops, which men are more likely to control. Women’s activities such as kitchen gardens, small livestock, post-harvest processing, and informal trading, are less frequently covered. As a result, even where a household is insured, women’s own livelihood risks often remain outside the policy.
There is also a trust dimension that is often underestimated. In low-income contexts, one experience of paying into a scheme and not receiving a payout when losses occur is enough to collapse confidence in insurance for years. Women, who are already at the margins of these systems, are especially vulnerable to that loss of trust. Once it happens, re-engagement can be very difficult.
Compounding all of this is a data gap that makes the problem harder to diagnose and address. Most insurance schemes do not collect sex-disaggregated data on enrollment, claims, payouts, retention, or decision-making. Without that data, it is nearly impossible to determine whether women are genuinely benefiting or merely being counted as indirect beneficiaries of schemes designed around men.
Insurance alone is not the answer
One of the most important things to understand about climate risk insurance for women in the Global South is that it cannot work as a standalone product. On its own, insurance can be too expensive, abstract, and limited in value for women who are navigating multiple systemic constraints simultaneously.
What does work and what evidence increasingly supports is bundled models: insurance linked with adaptation support such as drought-tolerant seeds, extension services, savings groups, credit access, climate early warning systems, and the strengthening of women’s farm organisations. When insurance is embedded within this kind of package, both uptake and retention improve measurably. The value proposition becomes real rather than theoretical.
The WFP and Oxfam R4 Rural Resilience Initiative, launched in 2011, is one such example. R4 links microinsurance with savings groups, credit access, improved farming practices, and climate information services, embedding insurance within a wider resilience system. By the early 2020s, it had reached over 150,000–180,000 farming households across ten countries. Women made up a significant share of participants, including about 65 percent in Malawi (WFP, 2019), with strong female participation across several sites.
Moreover, there is a wider design principle that is still largely absent from the sector: gender criteria needs to be embedded from the very start of an insurance scheme, not appended as a reporting requirement at the end. Many schemes are designed without women in mind and turn out to be male-centric in execution. Funders must require targets on women’s enrolment, control over payouts, female-led distribution partnerships, and sex-disaggregated monitoring throughout the life of a project.
How can more financing be deployed for gender-responsive climate risk insurance
Women-focused climate risk insurance cannot be scaled through commercial logic alone, particularly in the most climate-vulnerable markets. This is a structural reality that calls for a different kind of financing architecture.
The first layer is concessional and public finance. Climate funds, development finance institutions, and donors must step in not only to temporarily subsidise premiums – effectively ensuring that women are not priced out of protection from the start – but also to fund the public goods that make insurance viable: data systems, climate information infrastructure, and consumer education. These investments are the foundation on which commercially sustainable schemes can eventually be built.
The second layer is blended finance. Concessional capital can absorb early-stage risk, fund technical assistance, and support product innovation. Private insurers and reinsurers are better positioned to enter once a viable portfolio exists. In practice, this means front-loading investment in data quality, product design, and risk layering arrangements so that catastrophic losses are not borne entirely at the farmer level.
The third layer is channel strategy. Trying to reach women farmers one by one is prohibitively expensive and largely ineffective. Finance and insurance products are far more likely to reach women at scale when channelled through cooperatives, women’s producer groups, savings groups, rural banks, and social protection schemes. Women who are already organised are more likely to hold providers accountable. Transaction costs then drop and distribution becomes commercially realistic.
Gender sensitisation, of men as much as women, is also a practical entry point that often gets overlooked. Men who understand the value of women’s inclusion in insurance schemes are more likely to support enrollment. Women who understand their rights and options are more likely to demand them. Both require deliberate, community-level investment.
How gender is integrated into climate finance design at E Co.
At E Co, gender is built into how we design climate finance projects from the start. Our approach embeds gender considerations directly into the baseline analysis, ensuring they inform every strategic decision and remain central to how we monitor and measure project results.
In our work with governments, development finance institutions, multilateral agencies, and climate funds such as the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility, and the Adaptation Fund, we bring gender analysis into both design and delivery. One such example is E Co’s work with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and national stakeholders on the GCF-funded project “Implementing the Saint Lucia Fisheries Sectoral Adaptation Strategy Action Plan (SASAP).” The initiative combined climate risk assessments, strengthened data systems, and targeted upgrades to fisheries and aquaculture infrastructure, also focusing on access to finance and insurance – particularly for women and other underserved groups. E Co. embedded financial protection mechanisms early in the process, allowing the programme to advance a more inclusive model of resilience, ensuring that climate-vulnerable communities are better equipped not only to withstand shocks, but to recover and adapt with greater security and agency.
We help clients reflect this in their funding proposals by setting clear gender criteria and developing gender action plans that fit the context they are working in. We also support the use of sex-disaggregated data and build monitoring frameworks that show how different groups are affected and included over time.
Conclusion
The framing that matters most when designing gender-responsive climate risk insurance is one that is not largely infused in policy discourse: women-centred climate risk insurance is not a gender add-on. It is the core adaptation infrastructure. The women who produce Africa’s food are doing so in conditions of deepening unpredictability, with little or no financial cushion. Insuring these women is key in the transition to climate resilience. Climate finance that does not reach women smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa or any part of the world is not equitable. At E Co, we place importance on equitable inclusion in supporting clients to unlock finance for such projects.