By Ekhosuehi Iyahen Secretary General, IDF & Ivo Menzinger Chair, Operating Committee, IDF
Ten years ago, the Insurance Development Forum (IDF) was founded on a radical conviction: that insurance—properly mobilised through public-private partnerships—can be an important contributor to stability and economic development.
In our recently published 2025 Annual Review the data proves that the conviction was justified. From Lagos to Tashkent to Buenos Aires and Bridgetown, the IDF is not just enabling faster recovery after disasters. It is building the partnership models that allow Emerging Markets and Developing Economies to access insurance as a force for resilience, stability and sustainable development.
This work has always required innovation, collaboration, building partnerships and establishing implementation platforms that can endure the complexities around closing protection gaps effectively. That means creating structures that function efficiently and are able to attract private capital at scale and drive solutions that are commercially viable. Mechanisms that allow broad based progress in the face of increasingly complex climate and disaster risks and, ultimately help create markets that offer better protection.
In 2025, that steady approach continued to yield results —results that can be measured in numbers, yes, but just as importantly, in stronger operational platforms and partnerships, deeper trust, and more capable public systems.
Protecting the Most Vulnerable: Strengthening and opening new markets
In 2025 alone, 4 million+ people were afforded financial protection from IDF-designed products. These 4 million people represent more than a statistic—they represent governments better able to plan, agencies better able to respond to disasters, and communities better able to recover without falling into deeper vulnerability.
In Lagos State, Nigeria, our Tripartite Agreement Programme with UNDP and Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) delivered a parametric flood solution—combining advanced modelling with the creation of a public asset database. This is not just insurance coverage. It is stronger institutional risk management and faster, more predictable disaster response embedded within public systems.
In Syria, with the World Food Programme , 240,000 people were protected against drought-induced food insecurity. A USD 7.9 million payout was triggered in 2025—demonstrating that pre-arranged financing can work, even in the most fragile contexts.
Equally important, it demonstrated that humanitarian and insurance actors can work side by side to create structured, rules-based responses to disasters, rather than ad hoc appeals.
IDF members also designed an agricultural insurance product for 17,000 horticulture farmers in Uzbekistan, and insurance protection for 10,000 rice and maize farmers in Ecuador—while securing regulatory approvals that strengthen long-term market development.
These approvals and regulatory frameworks may not always make headlines, but they are foundational to building functioning domestic insurance markets that will outlast any single project cycle.
In Cambodia, a climate and health insurance pilot is reaching 186,000 people, many of them women and children —while helping local institutions build the data, underwriting capacity and governance structures needed for scale.
These numbers are of course only one part of the story. Our Integrated Disaster Risk Management Alliance (IDRIMA) partnership with the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) was also operationalised. The impact here is not simply counted in beneficiaries, but in public balance sheets strengthened and fiscal shocks mitigated before they materialise.
IDRIMA projects ranged from the design and structuring of insurance to protect the state-owned electricity provider in Costa Rica against financial losses associated with drought-induced reduction in hydro-electricity generation, to the design of a solution to protect against climate hazards for a hydropower plant in Mozambique.
These are not isolated projects. They are building blocks in national systems of financial protection that involve embedding risk financing into the very machinery of government and public finance.
Deploying insurance solutions also requires an enabling legal and regulatory environment. IDF engaged with global insurance regulators and policy makers to address barriers and to find ways that these officials can advance the understanding and use of insurance solutions. The IDF has developed a very constructive working relationship with the IAIS – International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) and important relationships with individual jurisdictions.
Financing Resilience Ex-Ante, Not Just Recovery
In 2025, we also reached a defining milestone: the USD 340 million first close of the IDF Infrastructure Resilience Development Fund (IRDF), developed and backed by IDF members AXA , Convex Insurance , Generali , SCOR , Swiss Re , Zurich Insurance and the IFC – International Finance Corporation (IFC), and managed by Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), part of BlackRock.
The message we sent was clear: that small- to medium-scale resilient infrastructure in emerging markets is investable and that institutional capital can and will support resilient growth when the right structures are in place.
The story here was not simply about capital raised. The IDF provided the platform for critical collaboration among many parties to design, then launch this novel fund.
The IRDF proved that resilience can be proactively financed at scale rather than paid for retrospectively after disasters strike.
Democratising Risk Knowledge
Fundamentally, resilience building starts with information. Decision-making about risk presents problems that require judgment and compromise, especially as comprehension of the nature of risk continues to evolve.
Central in guiding our effort at the IDF is the understanding that risk information and the capability to consistently generate it is a necessary foundation for sound fiscal policy, sovereign resilience and sustainable investment and growth.
In 2025 USD 8.5 million from the German Government was allocated to supporting sovereign risk analytics and capability strengthening in vulnerable countries. This was channelled through the Global Risk Modelling Alliance (GRMA) which was jointly established by the IDF with the Climate Vulnerable Forum and V20 Finance Ministers (CVF-V20) Group of countries.
Beyond the funding amount, what is being built is shared analytical infrastructure—tools and methodologies that governments can own, adapt and rely on over time.
The Governments of Ghana, Costa Rica and Madagascar are being supported through these programmes and an additional USD 600,000 of industry contribution was mobilised by the IDF to support the work of the GRMA and to strengthen open modelling infrastructure.
These contributions represent not only financial inputs, but a shift toward greater transparency, accessibility and collaboration in risk analytics – conditions essential for expanding insurability and deepening insurance markets.
In this area we also expanded public risk tools, launched new modelling platforms and deepened collaboration with the The World Bank Group and governments worldwide.
The fact is that access to risk analytics is not a technical luxury. It is a fiscal, economic and market necessity.
Embedding insurance and pre-arranged disaster risk finance into Global Development Policy
In 2025 the IDF also continued to engage with several critical international policy processes to contribute to discussions and support inclusion of insurance and pre-arranged disaster risk finance into policy documents that will shape the coming years.
Policy influence matters not for recognition—but because it shapes systems that govern billions in capital flows and fiscal decisions with very material implications for billions of people around the world.
At the G20 under the South African Presidency, the IDF served as Lead Private Sector Discussant, in support of the efforts of the IAIS and the World Bank Group, to raise the importance of addressing natural catastrophe protection gaps [1].
The G20 Heads of States’, Finance Ministers’ and Central Bank Governors’ Communiqués, alongside the Disaster Risk Reduction Ministerial Declaration, ultimately all underscored the importance of pre-arranged financing as a priority.
The significance here lies less in the number of references and more in the mainstreaming of pre-arranged risk financing into global economic governance.
Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance was also integrated into APEC – Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Finance Ministers’ roadmap, and insurance featured prominently in the Financing for Development outcome (Compromiso de Sevilla). All positive trends.
We also launched the IDF–Bridgetown Initiative Partnership and jointly published the report “From Risk to Resilience – How Insurance can Mobilise Disaster Finance and Climate Investment in Vulnerable Economies”[2], thereby advancing the case for embedding insurance within the international financial architecture, including active contribution into the COP30 Circle of Finance Ministers Road Map from Baku to Belém.
In addition to this, we issued an IDF report on “Increasing Insurability to Close Protection Gaps[3]” —offering over 50+ actionable recommendations, to multiple stakeholders, to make risks considered “uninsurable” now, insurable in the future and thereby enhance national and global resilience.
Here again, the recommendations themselves are important—but more critical is the coalition behind them and the implementation pathways now underway, some of which need to be built.
Institutions That Outlast Us
Today, we are proud that the IDF is able to bring together 120 member and partner organisations from across the world and galvanize over 200 experts across our 45 projects in 32 countries. Yet even these figures tell only part of the story.
This network is not incidental. It is the core of our model: public and private actors working together, grounded in implementation, aligned around the shared purpose of resilience. Collaboration models and implementation platforms that can be replicated to achieve scale. Relationships built over time that deepen trust, enable faster coordination, and more ambitious collaboration than would have been possible at the outset.
Building something that lasts and is effective in the context of the public private realm that the IDF exists in requires patience. It requires trust. It requires humility and the dogged conviction to focus on substance and implementation.
Climate risk is accelerating. Fiscal space is tightening. The protection gap remains vast and is even increasing in some geographies.
The work ahead is complex and the next decade will demand even stronger partnerships and collaboration, broader capital mobilisation and greater institutional durability to deliver the impact that is needed.
We are deeply grateful to our members and partners for the trust and commitment that have shaped this journey and it is our intention to scale what works, strengthen market foundations, and continue building the institutional architecture required for long-term resilience.
I invite you to read our 2025 Annual Review—not simply as a record of activity or simple compilation of figures, but rather as evidence of what sustained partnership, disciplined implementation focus and long-term commitment can build, achieve and deliver.
[1] G20-SFWG-input-paper-Identify-and-address-insurance-protection-gaps.pdf
[2] Bridgetown-IDF_From-Risk-to-Resilience.pdf
[3] IDF-Increasing-Insurability-to-Close-Protection-Gaps.pdf
