Agritask Expands Its Digital Agricultural Insurance Platform in Southern Africa by Partnering With Hollard Mozambique

PR Newswire

TEL AVIV, Israel and MAPUTO, Mozambique, June 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Agritask, a leading global developer of a holistic agronomic operations platform, and Hollard Mozambique, a premier insurance group in Mozambique, announced today the partnership to provide digital solutions to local stakeholders offering crop insurance for farmers in their respective value chains. To enable the use of high-resolution data at a national scale, the platform creates a village-based geographical clusterization for the whole country and will integrate additional data layers used to enhance risk assessment. Insured farms will be registered and mapped onto the platform, offering the real-time tracking of relevant parameters at each plot and at the portfolio level. The partnership will include data capturing tens of thousands of smallholders initially, with the expectation that it will increase ten-fold.

Dr. Rom Aviv, Managing Director - Head of Insurance of Agritask, commented: "An operations platform is the prerequisite to implement a rigorous agricultural insurance scheme at scale. Data requirement in crop insurance is highly complex and multidisciplinary, ranging from agronomy, climate and geospatial, to finance and administration. Creating a robust digital infrastructure can greatly enhance the existing methods. For countries prone to natural disasters such as Mozambique, it can also serve to strengthen preparedness and rehabilitation efforts, such as by generating alerts for the relevant farmers to take precaution. We are pleased to partner with Hollard, a premier insurance company who shares our vision for greater protection for smallholders."

Israel Muchena, Managing Director - Agricultural Insurance of Hollard, commented: "We see a significant opportunity to expand our agricultural insurance practice from both business and impact perspectives. As a company, we continue to work hard to improve climate resilience and food security for hundreds of thousands of smallholders in Africa. We are pleased to collaborate with Agritask that brings enabling technologies and shares the same goals as ours. At Hollard, we take pride in innovating and delivering improved insurance solutions for our clients."

About Agritask

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 resolution, to the level of each small plot. This creates a 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.

www.agritask.com

About Hollard Mozambique

Hollard Moçambique Companhia de Seguros, S.A. ("Hollard Mozambique") is one of the leading insurers in Mozambique, offering a complete range of corporate, commercial, and personal insurance products designed to meet the diverse needs of clients. For the agricultural sector, Hollard has capacity to underwrite both traditional commercial agricultural insurance policies and index-based insurance for the majority smallholder producers in Mozambique. Hollard is a beneficiary of a grant from the World Bank for research and development on index insurance. As part of our efforts to scale distribution of our index-insurance, we have benefited from support of aggregators such as Casa do Agricultor, ECA, Phoenix, Portucel, Proma and Sustenta. For the next agricultural season, we are increasing aggregators to include a new scheme with World Food Programme as well as an innovative project that we plan to launch with the development agency NCBA CLUSA and a local agricultural input supplier Phoenix Seeds Lda in the next season with sponsorship from USAID/ Fintrac. Our index insurance projects are part of our social impact goals, according to which Hollard is aiming to cover in Mozambique by 2024 a target of 100,000 low-income customers.

Hollard Mozambique is part of the Hollard Group ("Hollard"), South Africa's largest private insurer with operations across four continents and assets exceeding R23 billion, covering more than 10 million policy holders. Hollard provides short-term insurance, life insurance and investment products to a customer base that ranges from individual consumers in almost all income categories to large commercial and corporate clients. It have expertise in almost every class of insurance and, as well as collaborating with brokers and insurance specialists, we also work closely with financial service providers, retailers and affinity groups.

www.hollard.co.mz/

For media inquiries only, please contact Lilach Bar-Tal at [email protected] and [email protected]

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