By Abdulrahman Abdullahi
Pula, an agricultural technology company and a Pan-African firm operating in 12 African countries, including Nigeria, has been honoured for its services.
The company has developed and provided crops and livestock insurance to 4.3million smallholder farmers in Africa.
The company was honoured last weekend in Lagos as the continent’s Insur-Tech Company of the Year during the 6th annual African Insurance Award organised by the African Reinsurance Corporation (Africa Re).
While reading its profile it was disclosed that “Pula partners in Nigeria with leading Insurance companies such as Leadway Assurance and Veritas Kapital to help de-risk the millions of Nigerian smallholder farmers.
Through such partnerships, Pula has been able to make agriculture insurance accessible to a number of smallholder farmers who found insurance expensive and hard to acquire.
“In 2020, Pula worked with the Central Bank of Nigeria Anchor Borrowers programme to help de-risk the millions of smallholder farmers in Nigeria.
“This season alone, after the flood catastrophe that hit Nigeria, Pula is processing over 1billion Naira to be paid to over 15,774 farmers drawn across rice, maize and cotton farmers.
“Apart from the CBN, some of Pula clients in Nigeria have been Babban Gona, Flower Mills of Nigeria, NIRSAL Plc and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“Moreso, apart from Insurance, Pula bundles digital services for the insured farmers to help train them on better planting practices and early warning signs which is disseminated via sms,” it was revealed.
Ms Rose Goslinga, Pula’s co-founder, while accepting the award, said the award is a testimony to the company’s vision of building resilience and profitability for smallholder farmers across Africa which helps drive GDP of the continent.
She noted that with time, agricultural insurance will be a necessity product that will help transform the agriculture industry in Africa owing to the fact that agriculture in Africa is affected by several risks, including pests, diseases and climate change.
In her words, “With this award, we are more optimistic that agricultural insurance will be a necessity product that will help transform agriculture industry in Africa .
“We look forward as we close the year and begin a new year to partner more African governments and private sectors to help drive the uptake of agriculture insurance and drive resilience for an additional 10million farmers,” Goslinga said.
She continued, “We want to send a big shout out to the dedicated staff of Pula, partners, investors, insurers and smallholder farmers that we work with,” she added.
According to the event’s organizers, “the Insur-tech Award targets non-insurers collaborating with insurers to improve customer service delivery, product development and innovations. Pula uses the crop cut experiment as a claim assessment procedure instead of just relying on satellite data as a means of compensation trigger. This assessment relies heavily on actual crop cuts exercise at the farmer level and feedback is fed on enumerator’s Pula mobile apps which relay instant after-harvest season feedback to clients’ monitoring dashboards.”
This year, the award featured two panel discussions with industry leaders like Richard Lowe, Hammam Badr, Patrick Tumbo , Dominic Christian and prominent economists like Ludovic Subran and Carlos Lopez who reflected on the impact of Covid-19 on the African economy, especially the insurance industry , and how it can be rebuilt after the pandemic.
The event also witnessed the performance of some African artistes like Betty G. from Ethiopia, Femi Kuti from Nigeria and Magic System from Côte d’Ivoire
