Nearly 7,000 Kenyan Farmers Protected by the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition

Blockchain-based smart contracts trigger instant payouts to mobile wallets of smallholder farmers impacted by severe weather conditions, protecting them from crippling climate disasters and months-long claims process

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
The Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition, the first-of-its-kind, blockchain based parametric crop protection for subsistence farmers, announced today the completion of its initial launch. Led by the Lemonade Foundation, the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition provided protection for farmers’ livelihoods impacted by weather events during the recent growing season in Kenya. At the end of the season, those eligible were paid out instantly via smart blockchain contracts. The use of smart contracts enabled fast cash transfers without the need for filing claims, or for human adjusters, lowering costs, and avoiding the often months-long timeline associated with the process.

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Subsistence farmers participating in the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition’s initial launch attend event to celebrate the program’s first payouts, which took place days after the season ended. (Photo: Business Wire)

Alongside additional founding partners, Avalanche, Chainlink, DAOstack, Etherisc, Hannover Re, and Pula, the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition offered its non-profit, instantaneous crop protection program to smallholder farmers in the region at the commencement of the planting season. As a result, nearly 7,000 farmers signed up to protect their crops during the most recent short rains season from October 2022 to January 2023. Most of these included green grams and sorghum—principal staple foods grown throughout the region, with green grams representing a main food source for a majority of the population. At the end of the season cash transfers were automatically triggered based on area yield data and sent directly to farmers.

“Working alongside our partners and seeing the very real impact decentralized technologies can have on smallholder farmers in Kenya is incredibly encouraging,” said Shai Wininger, Director at the Lemonade Foundation. “We’ve built highly-accurate data models that trigger autonomous smart contracts, not only bringing the cost of handling a claim down to almost zero, but also providing the best experience for our customers. We’re excited to expand beyond this initial stage and continue scaling to give even more farmers access to critical financial protection when they need it most.”

“The Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition’s groundbreaking Kenya project built on Avalanche illustrates how blockchain is uniquely positioned to make the world better not only in the future, but now,” said John Wu, President of Ava Labs. “We are proud to support the Lemonade Foundation as it helps thousands of smallholder farmers secure their livelihoods from climate dangers. This project is still just on the runway, and thousands of farmers might just be the beginning of a massive movement.”

Grace Gombe Mlango, one of the first farmers to sign up for the program and the sole provider for her family, had purchased crop protection in the past; however, the delay in receiving her payout following that season’s lack of rain impacted her ability to prepare and plan for the season ahead. When she was introduced to the mission behind the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition, she was inspired to try again.

“Climate change has really impacted my family, especially when it comes to what we plant and our livestock. We previously planted maize, but with the current rainfall, we prefer green grams because we [usually can] still harvest them even with little rain. Once I harvest it, I can sell it and buy maize from other farmers—a key source of food and income for my family,” said Grace. “Farming is a game of chance, and when I was told about the program, I felt it was better to register because if the season fails, we would be compensated. I registered that same day, which was easy. And given this season, the compensation I received will help me buy food for my family and seeds for the next season.”

The next phase of the project will focus on the upcoming long rains season in Kenya in April, with plans to scale the program throughout the region and expand to support tens of thousands more subsistence farmers facing real climate risks to their livelihoods.

To learn more about the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition, visit www.lemonade.org, or read more about the initial launch here.

About The Lemonade Foundation

The Lemonade Foundation is a nonprofit organized under IRC section 501(c)(4). The foundation was founded by Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger and funded by Lemonade shareholders prior to the company’s IPO. The Lemonade Foundation is an independent legal entity, and is not owned or controlled by Lemonade, Inc. or its shareholders. Lemonade’s founders currently serve as directors in the foundation.

More information can be found at www.lemonade.org.

About the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition

The Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition launched in March 2022 to provide subsistence farmers with the ability to easily and effectively sign up for at-cost parametric crop protection. The Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition was formed by the Lemonade Foundation alongside founding members including Avalanche, Chainlink, DAOstack, Etherisc, Hannover Re, and Pula. Farmers are able to sign up for the program, make, and receive payments from their phone, much as they do for banking and payments today, which then produces a smart contract hosted on the blockchain. Following the end of a growing season, area yield data is sent on-chain to the application’s smart contracts and, if weather conditions were bad and crops failed, triggers an instant payout to farmers.

About Avalanche

Avalanche is a smart contracts platform that scales infinitely and regularly finalizes transactions in less than one second. Its novel consensus protocol, Subnet infrastructure, and HyperSDK toolkit enable Web3 developers to easily launch powerful, custom blockchain solutions. Build anything you want, any way you want, on the eco-friendly blockchain designed for Web3 devs.

Website | Whitepapers | Twitter | Discord | GitHub | Documentation | Telegram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | YouTube

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the industry-standard Web3 services platform that has enabled trillions of dollars in transaction volume across DeFi, insurance, gaming, NFTs, and other major industries. As the leading decentralized oracle network, Chainlink enables developers to build feature-rich Web3 applications with seamless access to real-world data and off-chain computation across any blockchain and provides global enterprises with a universal gateway to all blockchains.

Learn more about Chainlink by visiting chain.link or reading the developer documentation at docs.chain.link. To discuss an integration, reach out to an expert.

About DAOStack

Founded in 2017, DAOstack has pioneered the DAO space by creating the first operational on-chain DAO platform, on top of which the DXdao is now managing a treasury of over $70M, being the world’s largest on-chain DAO. Currently, DAOstack is paving the road towards DAO 2.0, a social operating system for large-scale collaboration allowing millions of people to self-organize around shared goals and solve complex, global challenges.

About Etherisc

Etherisc’s goal is to make insurance fair and accessible through its open-source, decentralized insurance protocol to collectively build insurance products on the Ethereum blockchain. Its open-source common infrastructure, the Generic Insurance Framework (GIF), includes shared smart contracts, product templates, microservices and the native cryptographic token (DIP) to enable the seamless and efficient creation of decentralized insurance products, with increased transparency and fairness for all parties.

Since its launch in 2016 by a team of legal, financial, and mathematical visionaries, the Etherisc protocol has been reimagining insurance solutions to democratize the process in the interest of the consumer. Projects currently hosted on Etherisc’s open-source Generic Insurance Framework include FlightDelay protection, Crop protection, and USDC Depeg protection.

About Hannover Re

Hannover Re, with gross premium of more than EUR 33 billion, is the third-largest reinsurer in the world. It transacts all lines of property & casualty and life & health reinsurance and is present on all continents with around 3,500 staff. Established in 1966, the Hannover Re Group today has a network of more than 170 subsidiaries, branches and representative offices worldwide. The Group's German business is written by the subsidiary E+S Rück. The rating agencies most relevant to the insurance industry have awarded both Hannover Re and E+S Rück outstanding financial strength ratings: Standard & Poor's AA- "Very Strong" and A.M. Best A+ "Superior".

Please note the disclaimer:

https://www.hannover-re.com/535917

About Pula

Pula is an insuretech firm (www.pula.io) that provides agriculture insurance design and execution services, specializing in index based insurance and backed by top tier VC and impact investors. Since 2015 Pula has enabled climate insurance to 9.3 mln smallholder farmers, 31% of which were women across 19 markets in Africa and Asia who pay an average of $10 per season to insure their crops. So far Pula has unlocked over $1.7bln of capital from local and international insurance markets for climate risks and paid out $30mln to our client farmers.

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Natalie Gerke
natalie.gerke@lemonade.com

Source: The Lemonade Foundation