Health Micro-insurance: A Compendium

As poverty and social exclusion remain major problems in the world, even as we step into the third millennium, the quest for solutions continues. The STEP Global Programme of the ILO explores innovative methods that contribute to these solutions, one of which is micro-insurance. Micro-insurance as a concept is relatively new and its documented experiences are still fairly scarce. The STEP Global Programme thus endeavours to discover more of these experiences in an effort to evaluate their potential to reduce poverty and social exclusion.

This Compendium provides key information on 130 health micro-insurance schemes (HMIS) from 26 countries and 3 continents. It allows interested parties to obtain a broad overview of a large number of the health micro-insurance schemes that exist in the world today. Its main aim is to serve as a facilitating tool for interested parties who want to initiate contacts with HMIS operators and developers. Therefore, special efforts were made, where possible, to include the addresses, telephone and fax numbers and email addresses of the documented schemes, hoping that it will encourage future communication between people and institutions actively involved in the field of health micro-insurance.

This Compendium is not a comprehensive guide to health micro-insurance schemes nor does it include an analysis of the different schemes presented. Likewise, the content of this Compendium is not intended to promote a preferred model of how to design, implement and manage HMIS. Finally, one should not infer STEP’s policy from the content of this Compendium.

This document is a preliminary version of a database which will be published on the Internet, allowing even more people to have easy and low-cost access to annually updated information.

Click the icon below to download the full PDF file (784 kb) [ step.pdf ]

For further information, please contact: ILO-STEP Programme Department of Social Security International Labour Office, 4, route des Morillons, 1211 Geneva 22, Switzerland. Telephone: + 41 22 799 6544 Fax: + 41 22 799 6644 e-mail: step@ilo.org

For further information on ILO's microinsurance initiatives, also see: GIMI: Global Information on MicroInsurance

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Hari Srinivas - hsrinivas@gdrc.org
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