Building Resilience Through Inclusive Insurance: Insights From the European Microfinance Award 2025

This publication is the culmination of a year’s work exploring how insurance can help low-income and vulnerable people manage risk, recover from shocks, and build long-term resilience. It situates inclusive insurance within the wider financial inclusion agenda, explaining why protection remains the weakest link in most portfolios and why uptake has historically lagged. It then examines the core challenges – among them affordability, accessibility, awareness, and behavioral barriers – and outlines why insurance, when well designed, can expand both security and opportunity and increase vulnerable households’ resilience.

The heart of the paper is structured primarily around four thematic areas that emerged from the initial field of 103 applicants down to the final 12 that are profiled within the paper:

• Behavioral and demand-side innovation: How trust, comprehension, and salience shape uptake, and how community structures and gender-responsive design can overcome persistent behavioral barriers.
• Bundling and embedding: How insurance gains traction when integrated into services and systems clients already use – MFIs, cooperatives, retail channels, and everyday financial interactions – or when integrated with other financial products.
• Digital, index-based and process innovation: How technology reduces friction, accelerates claims, and builds credibility, from parametric triggers to digital case-management.
• Ecosystems and cross-sector collaboration: Why sustainable inclusive insurance depends on alignment across insurers, cooperatives, governments, telcos, MFIs, and reinsurers, and how multi-actor systems support scale.

The paper also presents ten cross-cutting insights distilled from the twelve semi-finalists and three finalists of the Award, pulling together observations from the core EMA team within e-MFP, and the consultants and experts that supported the team over the year. These insights highlight what works across different contexts as exemplified by the outstanding applicants to this Award: visible and rapid claims, trusted delivery channels and behavioral habits, flexible premium structures, gender-aware design, meaningful digital integration, and the need to balance risk transfer with prevention and client support.