Leadway Assurance partners AGRA to empower smallholder farmers on climate resilience

Leadway Assurance Company Limited has entered into a strategic partnership with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to impact 21,000 smallholder farmers (SHFs) across Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Niger States.

This is a significant step towards deepening agricultural resilience across Nigeria, through a $399,900 grant initiative to implement the “Building Farmers’ Resilience via Innovative Insurance Models and Financial Instruments” project.

AGRA is an African institution supporting inclusive agricultural transformation and sustainable food systems.

The three-year initiative, running from March 2025 to March 2028, aims at transforming the livelihoods of 21,000 smallholder farmers (SHFs) across the three States.

The company said climate change has continued to escalate risks for Nigerian farmers, manifesting in unpredictable rainfall, prolonged droughts, extremely high lethal temperatures and increased crop failure.

This volatility, it added threatens national food security/systems and undermines years of agricultural progress.

Recognising the scale of this challenge, Leadway Assurance said it took a bold step forward, to champion innovative risk management strategies tailored to the realities of rural agriculture.

The company stated that at the heart of the new intervention is the “Pay at Harvest” insurance scheme, an innovative premium collection model that enables farmers to defer insurance payments until after harvest, when liquidity is more assured.

It added that this approach lowers the financial barriers to insurance enrollment, increases uptake among SHFs, and embeds resilience within the agricultural value chain.

According to the company, “Pay at Harvest” empowers farmers to protect their livelihoods without upfront costs, ensuring they can bounce back from climate-related losses and secure credit, inputs, and market access with greater confidence.

It stressed that this new grant builds upon Leadway Assurance’s successful three-year partnership with Heifer International, under which over 60,000 smallholder farmers benefited from the “Pay at Harvest” model.

The Insurer stated that the current AGRA-funded and sponsored project goes a step further by offering a more holistic package, including “access to off-takers and market linkages, extension services and climate-smart agronomy support, digital mapping of farmlands for enhanced monitoring and accountability, timely early warning systems for extreme weather events, scalable farmer education programmes to promote financial literacy and climate-smart practices, and expanding public-private collaborations for unlocking innovative finance, including green climate finance, for crop insurance”.

Leadway Assurance will work alongside expert partners to deliver the ambitious vision by unlocking catalytic finance for SHFs.

It projected that by 2028, the initiative would also facilitates $10 million in agricultural credit, launch six new financial products tailored to SHFs needs and disseminate  four knowledge products to drive broader sectoral adoption.

In his comment, Mr. Fatona Ayoola, Head, Agribusiness, Leadway Assurance, described the partnership with AGRA as a decisive moment for agricultural risk management in Nigeria.

He said, “By bringing bespoke parametric insurance solutions to underserved communities who are vulnerable to the negative impact of climate change and aligning them with broader value chain interventions, we are not only protecting livelihoods but also rebuilding trust in farming as a viable business for rural Nigerians.”

Speaking also, Dr. Rufus Idris, Country Director at AGRA said, “For Nigeria’s agricultural transformation and food security efforts to succeed amid increased climate uncertainty, insurance needs to work better in helping smallholder farmers protect their farmlands and crops from climate change shocks (flood, draught, pest and diseases, etc.). Hence, this project aims to help build on a proven model and catalyze resources for a wider access to insurance and adoption by smallholder farmers.”

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