BY NKECHI NAECHE-ESEZOBOR—Continental Reinsurance Plc, the largest private pan-African reinsurer, has selected the Agritask risk management platform to enhance its agricultural reinsurance operations.
Agritask is a leading developer of an agronomic operations platform with clients in 5 continents ranging from food & beverage to financial services businesses.
It will support Continental Re through its flexible data- driven system and modelling suite offering functionalities such as risk monitoring, portfolio exposure management, business intelligence and process optimization.
Dr Femi Oyetunji, Group Managing Director, Continental Re, commented: “The African continent offers infinite growth opportunities for (re)insurers interested in supporting smallholder farmers in the era of climate change.
The commercial opportunity combined with our social aspirations are key motivation for us to significantly expand our agricultural insurance franchise.
Given the low penetration levels of agricultural (re)insurance in Africa, we believe that technology is a key enabler of profitable growth, to enter underserved areas while maintaining attractive margins.
We are excited to commence collaboration with Agritask to deploy cutting-edge technology and tailored solutions for our operations.”
Dr. Rom Aviv, Managing Director – Head of Insurance of Agritask, commented: “Agricultural (re)insurance is the most suitable financial instrument to support food security and economic sustainability in Africa.
As a pioneer in agricultural technology and insurance innovation, we are thrilled to support Continental Re, a leading risk carrier in the continent, in its ambition to utilize technology to grow their agricultural risk transfer franchise.
Through this, Continental Re will be able to better support the livelihood of hundreds of millions smallholder farmers.”
Agritask is a holistic ag-operations platform, designed to enable fact-based decision making for agricultural businesses.
It is successfully deployed in more than 30 countries, with a broad spectrum of clients ranging from large growers, multi-farm corporations, private equity managers, ag-buyers, food conglomerates, ag-financing and insurance companies, to governments and NGOs.
For crop insurance, Agritask enables the offering of personalized and rigorous insurance products, with a capacity to serve millions of smallholders in one project.
The system helps register and map small farms, obtain field data, then use their locations to correlate secondary data such as satellite or weather at a high solution, to the level of each small plot.
This creates dynamic database to assess risks, design targeted insurance products, and monitor crop performance remotely through the season. Its ability to do so at scale is supported by remote sensing and geographical capabilities, including satellite-based auto-crop and plot detection models, crop health monitoring, and damage assessment post-certain natural events.
Continental Reinsurance is a private pan-African reinsurance company that has been on the continent for over 30 years. It writes business in more than 50 African countries, which are serviced from six client service centres in Nigeria, Botswana, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya and Tunisia. It also has an inhouse technical ‘referral competence’, Continental Property and Engineering Risk Services (CPERS), that services all its clients across Africa. With a diversified and profitable portfolio, it offers its clients a product of indisputable value underpinned by uncompromising service and technical capability.
