When her baby was sick, Deepa Kahar's (left) health insurance through Opportunity covered treatment and medicine.

After all, our financial services for clients all over the world–including savings products, small business loans and microinsurance—can often mean the difference between providing for their families or being unable to make ends meet. These critical financial safety nets are the keys to protecting people from sliding deeper into poverty in the face of financial hardship or unexpected disaster.

This week, we’re giving you one more great way to support our work by buying one of Sevenly’s limited edition tees or a hoodie. We’ll be featured on sevenly.org until Monday, February 6th at 9:59 a.m. PST (11:59 a.m. CST). T-shirts are $22, hoodies are $35, and $7 of every sale goes to help us end poverty. See one of the tees below and check out the rest of the designs on sevenly.org.

Remember, the items are only available until Monday and when they’re gone, they’re gone for good. Sevenly says, “When we say ‘gone,’ we mean FOR-EV-ER.”So take this chance to buy now and wear your Sevenly shirt or hoodie with pride!

1. An Insightful Journey

Family Week travelers with the Amigos del Progreso Trust Group in Cartagena, Colombia

At Opportunity, we know it’s important to visit our field staff, meet our clients, and connect with the people and communities we serve. We also feel that our donors should have the opportunity to see this work firsthand through our Insight Trips. A life-changing experience, this year we saw the number and diversity of our Insight Trips grow. In March, a group celebrated the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day in India, in June we hosted our Family Week trip to Colombia, and in July a group of YAO supporters visited Tanzania. We hope you were able to be a part of these great experiences and if not, we invite you to check out the opportunities this year to join us on a trip as we visit clients and staff in countries from Latin America to Africa to Asia.

2. From 18,000 Feet in the Air to the White House

In February, young professional Sarah jumped out of a plane for our clients in Tanzania.

• Jump for Opportunity showed how passionate and daring our YAO members are! On February 19, 2011, 29 adventurers, from YAO supporters to Opportunity staff, jumped out of a plane at 18,000 feet to raise support for our clients in Tanzania. The idea came from one YAO member, challenging others to risk jumping out of a plane in solidarity with our loan clients who take risks every day through their own business ventures. The event raised over $100,000 for our clients in Tanzania, and the unique approach also helped launch it to the final round of the Stay Classy Awards in their Most Creative Fundraiser category.
• A plane wasn’t the only place YAO celebrated young entrepreneurs’ work and support in sustainable development. YAO, along with Empact, spoke at the White House during the FEE (Future of Entrepreneurship Education) Summit in November. Empact presented their Empact 100, a list of the top 100 companies started by young entrepreneurs who encourage local investment in communities and social responsibility.

3. The 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day

The image of Opportunity Kenya client Judith Godiah, and her children, featured in the special supplement of USA Today

This year was the centennial celebration of International Women’s Day, observed on March 8. In addition to Opportunity’s International Women’s Day Insight Trip to India, we also chose this important date to launch our 2011 Banking on Women initiative. The two-month campaign honored women worldwide and built awareness for the impact financial services have on their lives and families. USA Today also featured a special supplement in honor of IWD entitled “Investing in Women & Girls,” which included Opportunity’s work empowering women–who make up 84% of our client base—with small business loans, tools and services.

4. The Opportunity Family is growing

Vice Governor of Central Bank of Congo at Opportunity DRC's ribbon-cutting

We are always excited to be able to continue our microfinance work in new areas. On May 19, we were thrilled to open our doors in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Local and national government officials, as well as Opportunity country and international staff, joined the event alongside our new clients. Words cannot completely describe the tenor of the day, so please feel free to watch the video of dancing and celebration as Opportunity takes its first official steps in the DRC bringing financial services to a new entrepreneurs and communities.

5. Top 40 is Not Just for Ryan Seacrest…

The "Side by Side" gala at the International Market Square in Minneapolis.

• Devex, a leader in international development resources, named Richard Leftley, President and CEO of MicroEnsure, one of London’s top 40 development leaders under 40. Furthermore, in June, MicroEnsure won the FT/IFC Sustainable Finance Award, organized by the Financial Times and the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group. The major award recognized MicroEnsure’s work in creating life insurance products in Ghana through mobile phone technology.
• Opportunity International also turned 40 this year! We celebrated this milestone at our conference in San Francisco in October, and at our gala events in Minneapolis in November, and Phoenix in December. The events captured the spirit of founder, Al Whittaker, to serve and equip those in poverty, highlighted the lives already touched by Opportunity over the years, and challenged all to continue that dream by raising funds and support for Opportunity.

This year we celebrated first steps, and anniversaries. We celebrated the role of women, and young professionals highlighted the work of our clients in unconventional ways. At Opportunity, we eagerly look forward to what 2012 will bring, and invite you to continue with us along the way.

This innovative life insurance product makes it possible for many more MicroEnsure clients to access insurance.

After the successful pilot, MicroEnsure scaled up the operation in Ghana, reaching more than 250,000 people within the first six months. As a result of this product, the agency will more than double the number of Ghanaians who have access to life insurance in 2011.

A similar product, Tigo Bima, has now been introduced to customers in Tanzania. Tigo Bima is a 30-day insurance product that protects subscribers in the event of loss of life due to accident or illness. The product is supported technically by Milvik and administratively by MicroEnsure to ensure that claims are paid within 72 hours after documentation is received.

This story first appeared in our winter 2012 Impact newsletter. Read this and more updates on our microfinance work, and our strategic partners, staff and clients in Impact by clicking here.

“…Yes, there is tragedy in Africa, and you will always find it there, and we must take those tragedies seriously, but there is also extraordinary opportunity. And if you see this continent as the continent of the future, it sort of reframes it. This is a continent that, by 2050, will be the largest and the youngest continent in the world…” – U2′s Bono, July 2011, The David Letterman Show

As we close out 2011 and consider the momentous year it was for Africa–from the Arab Spring uprisings in north Africa, to the ongoing famine in the Horn of Africa, to the recent violence around the president elections in the DR Congo–it’s refreshing to remember the positive stories that also have emerged from the continent. So when one of my colleagues forwarded me this article, “Ten Biggest Positive Africa Stories of 2011,” in The New Yorker, I wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate these good news stories from Africa. As author Alexis Okeowo writes, “There are always caveats to any good news, but, for now, the good is outweighing the bad. Africa is a place that is impossible to reduce to any generalities, except maybe this one: it has an enormous amount of potential.”

Among the good news items lauded by Okeowo…

• Africa is experiencing an economic boom. Okeowo cites that Africa is predicted to have the largest economic growth of any continent over the next decade. “As domestic industries, entrepreneurs, and foreign investors prepare to take advantage of this growth, the economies of at least a dozen countries have expanded by more than six per cent a year for six or more years.” That’s a key statistic not only for Africa’s wealthy and middle class, but also for the impoverished families working hard for economic survival. At Opportunity, we offer microfinance loans and other financial tools to economically marginalized families to help them bridge the gap between economic subsistence and stability. An inflow of capital to a local economy trickles down to help vulnerable people break the cycle of poverty.
• South Sudan gained its independence after two decades of civil war. Though the world watched nervously as the independence referendum unfurled, and tensions are still high, a tenuous détente has prevailed.
• Two Liberian women won the Nobel Peace Prize. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia’s first female leader, and the activist Leymah Gbowee were among the three female Nobel Peace Prize laureates. They were the first women to be awarded the prize since the late Professor Wangari Maathai won in 2004.
• Cell phones continue to change how Africans live. Okeowo cites mobile healthcare tracking in Rwanda, and Kenya‘s cell phone banking system, “called the world’s most innovative,” which lets Kenyans “pay bills, send remittances, purchase goods and airtime, move funds among accounts, and even take out and pay back loans for entrepreneurial ventures.” Those are just two examples of the almost endless possibilities for accessing Africans with services via their mobile phones. MicroEnsure piloted a mobile phone life insurance program with Tigo Ghana, and the program was so successful that it’s now testing it with Tigo Bima in Tanzania. MicroEnsure expects to double the number of Ghanaian clients with life insurance by the end of 2011.

To read all ten of Okeowo’s good news stories from Africa, read her piece on newyorker.com.

Insurance client James Abuh-Prah in Accra, Ghana.

• During 2011, MicroEnsure grew ten-fold in Africa to cover more than one million people in Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania. Within two years, the company expects to serve more than five million people in Africa, the vast majority of whom have never had access to insurance.

• In the past year, MicroEnsure has nearly doubled the number of people it covers in Ghana by partnering with a telecommunications company Tigo, which uses the product to reward loyal customers with free insurance.

• In Tanzania and Kenya, MicroEnsure is testing health insurance for coffee-growing farmers in the Kilimanjaro area. It provides in-patient and out-patient care to farmers and their families by using local private health clinics.

Insurance helps clients like James (pictured), who successfully grew his electronics business only to lose everything to devastating floods, avoid sliding back into poverty when disaster strikes. James took out a loan from Opportunity Ghana that included life insurance for him and his family, disability insurance, and property insurance to cover his business against catastrophic loss. Within days of filing his claim, James received a payout for the value of his business so that he could clean up, re-stock and get back to supporting his family. MicroEnsure helps clients like James maintain the foothold out of poverty they have worked so hard to achieve.

For more news on MicroEnsure’s growth, visit microensure.com »

Watch the live video stream of Summit plenary sessions, as well as the closing ceremony on Thursday, Nov. 17.

Follow the events of the conference on the Microcredit Summit Campaign’s Facebook page and on Twitter @MicroCredSummit at hashtag #2011MCSummit.

Richard Leftley’s workshop session, entitled “What Have We Learned about the Most Effective Ways to Use Micro-Insurance to Reduce Vulnerability: Health, Life, Disaster and More,” will reflect on the lessons Opportunity has learned in delivering microinsurance to millions of people in nine countries. The panel is chaired by Marten Leijon, Executive Director, Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX), USA, and features: Craig Churchill, Social Finance Programme, International Labour Organization (ILO), Switzerland; Anne Hastings, CEO, Fonkoze Financial Services, Haiti; Pompy Sridhar, Vice President – Programme, ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, India; and Thérèse Sandmark, Agricultural Microinsurance Officer, Grameen Crédit Acrigole Microfinance Foundation, France.

Watch this big annual event unfold in social media and in live video coverage, and join the conversation at #2011MCSummit as experts address some of the most crucial challenges facing the industry today.

Richard Leftley, president and CEO of MicroEnsure. (Photo: Global Microfinance Operations)

Here’s what he said:

Eliza Villarino: What do you see as your main achievement in the microinsurance realm?

Richard Leftley: Ten years ago I was one of the first to see that a market for insurance to the poor existed and I am proud of the role that we have played in providing millions of people with insurance for the first time. I am also proud of the innovation that has become synonymous with MicroEnsure’s work; a first mover on weather index products to help the poor with changing climates, a first mover in providing health insurance in Africa and a first mover in selling insurance not just through microfinance companies but also through mobile networks and churches.

E.V.: What new uses of microinsurance do you find the most innovative and promising in boosting global development?

R.L.: Microinsurance is about providing a safety net to the world’s low income and middle income market; stopping them falling back into poverty following a disaster. But in order to be sustainable, it has also to be about massive scale. For this reason I am most excited about the role that mobile phone networks can play in providing access to millions of people who have yet to have insurance. [Ultimately] we will double the number of people that have insurance in Ghana as a result of being able to reach a new market through mobile networks.

E.V.: What has been your main challenge scaling up MicroEnsure’s global operations, and how have you overcome it?

R.L.: MicroEnsure serves over 3 million people with a range of microinsurance products and is currently growing in excess of 200,000 new clients per month. During our first two years of operation we really struggled to gain traction in terms of growth; we had to learn which distribution partnerships would result in the greatest scale and why different partners were more productive than others. The greatest challenge for microinsurance is finding willing and able points of distribution for the products.

Read the original post on devex.com »

Who’d have thought that getting up at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning to listen to someone speak about microinsurance would have been so interesting? In this session, Richard Leftley talked about how providing insurance for those living in poverty has created an impact on individuals and has proven to be a powerful safety net.

Richard Leftley leads the conference breakout session on microinsurance.

Leftley has worked with Opportunity International for the last 10 years on getting insurance into poverty stricken areas. He started thinking of ways to provide insurance products while working in Zambia. A woman approached him and explained that she was frustrated because he didn’t understand her life. “My life is like this Chutes & Ladders board [game],” Leftley narrated. “The loans Opportunity gives me are like ladders, they give me growth. But where are you when disaster strikes? When someone in my family dies?” This is when Leftley understood that his role was to provide this community with a safety net.

For microinsurance to work, there are three key roles that need to be performed: Risk Carrier, Front Office, and Back Office. MicroEnsure works primarily in the Back Office, designing products and processes, training sales staff and clients, collecting/storing/reporting data, and handling administrative duties. “Paying claims quickly is the most important thing for the poor,” and MicroEnsure works to create the structure that makes this possible.

One of the innovative ways that they are now selling insurance products is through mobile phone companies. There are two main approaches they have taken in Africa. MicroEnsure’s partnership with Tigo has been their most successful one. In Africa, mobile phones are all prepaid. Tigo introduced insurance as part of a loyalty program: the more money you spend on your phone, the more credits you get for insurance. Users would receive a text message saying: “Thank you for using Tigo. Based on your Tigo usage in December, your free life insurance is XXX credits for January. Use more Tigo, get more insurance!” With this program, they have been able to double their clients.

The other way that they have been selling insurance is by putting an insurance menu directly on the mobile phone. The menu is simple, easy to use, and allows individuals to buy different levels of coverage for themselves and members of their family, and the payment comes right out of their mobile phone credit.

MicroEnsure’s products include coverage for life, property, weather, livestock, and health. They search for trusted sources such as churches, microfinance providers, and recognized brands to introduce the idea and benefits of insurance to potential customers. Their simple product and process design has created cost-effective access to risk protection for communities living in poverty.

This post was written by Barbie Lucio. Barbie is a member of the San Francisco chapter of YAO and works with philanthropists to create change and impact.

“I want  to give you a whistle-stop tour of the last five years at MicroEnsure,” Richard Leftley says.

Background on MicroEnsure

• When a woman asked me where we would be if her children got sick or her property got damaged in a fire, I realized that was what we needed to do. We needed to protect people from falling back into poverty after a disaster.
• In 2002, we spent time with clients assessing their needs, we began with health products for HIV and we expanded to funeral and then property insurance, which is especially important in high-density urban environments with fires and other disasters.
• The MicroEnsure board then challenged us to expand with more products and so we offered weather index crop insurance.
• We found that people needed to be paid within days or weeks but local insurance companies could only pay in months and years, and some didn’t do health insurance. So we increased our control over underwriting, while still working through the local insurance companies.

Today at MicroEnsure

• Mobile phone companies have turned out to be the key.  We partner with companies in Asia and Africa, where there are 5,000 new mobile phone clients every day. We offer a product through the mobile phone companies where people receive a certain amount of insurance for free just for using their phones.
• MicroEnsure has 3.2 million clients. In July 2011 alone, we grew by 500,000 new clients, and we hope to exceed 4 million clients by the end of the year.
• Our challenges today: MicroEnsure is three and a half years old. We spent the first two years understanding and building partnerships and went from 600,000 to 2 million clients in 2010. We continue to try to push boundaries, developing innovative products.

Caller question: About the mobile phone insurance product—is it linked to airtime and amount of customer use?

It is linked to customer use and airtime. Trust is crucial. We’ve found that people in poverty don’t trust insurance companies but they do trust mobile phone companies. Mobile phone companies investigated what would make people even more loyal and they found that people wanted insurance. So we have implemented a free life insurance contract. Customers voluntarily sign up by text messaging the company. Everyone gets a low level of life insurance for free, but if they use more air time to call or text, then they can earn higher levels of insurance, the company texts them and lets them know their level of usage month by month and how much insurance it’s earned them for the next month. They simply get a text at the end of the month that says what they’ve earned in free insurance.

In Ghana, we are working to sign up millions because virtually no one has insurance. Then we will go back and contact the client. They see how the free insurance has protected them, so we ask, “Would you like to pay a little more and add your family to your insurance plan?” Then later, we ask, “Would you like to add a health insurance policy for $1 a month?” We have found if we go right in and offer health insurance, people don’t trust you enough yet, and they won’t buy. But if build up to it, they will trust you and they will see how beneficial it is for them to buy it. This is proving to be a successful model.

Staff question from Opportunity VP Jennifer Mitrenga: I recently got back from an Insight Trip to Tanzania with the Young Ambassadors. We went and saw MicroEnsure’s health insurance product firsthand. Could you share a little about that?

Our health insurance product sprung from clients’ needs. They like life insurance products but as one woman said to me, “We’re only going to die once, but we’ll go to the doctor two to three times a year, so can you help with that cost?” In India we offer health insurance for $10/year for a family of four, and it covers inpatient hospitalization. It’s cashless with an ID card. We handle all financial costs and processes for the clients behind the scenes. We chose India to pilot that product because it’s simpler to operate there. We learned a lot.

We then wanted to do health insurance in Africa, so we chose Tanzania and began with the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union (KNCU), a coffee growers’ union of several hundred members. They wanted a health insurance policy. The model we designed for them included all doctor visits for the family. We determine the annual costs of this and then we pay up front. If a farmer is hospitalized for any reason, we have provided extra insurance to cover that. We go in and advocate for their health too—if we find there are any problems with doctors, we can go in and change their behavior. We underwrite the product and we manage it, and we built out a network of existing clinics who agreed to be part of the product. We go to each of the clients’ homes and ID them with fingerprints. In fact, we downloaded an app for our mobile devices using open source software and tailored it for only $7. Now we want to scale up to reach 100,000 families in Tanzania by the end of 2012. We’re looking to set up a new vehicle called MicroEnsure Labs to innovate new ideas.

Caller question: Congratulations on your tremendous growth in the last few years. As you look forward, give us a brief executive summary of where you hope to be in five years.

We’re going to separate out our core business–mobile phones and microfinance. We realized we need to bring in strategic partners to stabilize and grow the mobile phone aspect of the business. I will bring in more companies to partner and grow that sector. Right now, we’re exclusively owned by Opportunity, but we could partner with more stakeholders who wish to get involved with us. We’re seeing that the partnerships that we have–at the rates our mobile phone partnerships are growing–expect to get up to 100 million people, so we’re growing fast.

We do need to focus on research and development to bring more impactful products to our clients and innovate our distribution policies. Not just microfinance, though that’s very important, but through mobile phone companies and the Internet. Much like the growth of mobile phones in the last few years, the Internet will explode across Africa in the next three years, and most mobile phones on the continent will become 3G. This all needs to be properly financed through philanthropy. It took seven years of Opportunity’s support through grants and donations to create our current model. We can shorten that cycle to 12 months because of what we’ve already learned. We do need individuals to support our work to help us innovate.

Want to learn more from Richard Leftley? Attend the breakout session “Microinsurance: A Powerful Safety Net” led by Richard at Opportunity’s annual conference, Oct. 14-15 in San Francisco. Go to opportunity.org/conference.

Go to opportunity.org/africa »

This summer, take a small part in this big need

Bank on Africa:

• Check out opportunity.org/africa. And click to Share the Campaign with your social networks
• Make a Donation. Just $15 brings a woman access to a savings account—and identification—for the first time in her life
• Get Campaign updates. Like Opportunity on Facebook and follow @OpportunityIntl on Twitter
• Sign up for regular email updates from the Opportunity Blog

For more on the Banking on Africa Campaign, go to opportunity.org/africa. Thank you for helping Opportunity to make an even greater impact on the lives of our clients in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Watch video to learn more about how Opportunity is Banking on Africa: