Agricultural insurance markets in Africa and Asia have been piloting a wide array of agricultural insurance products for more than twenty years but still struggle to build scalable and sustainable models, except for few examples like in India and Zambia. Developing agricultural insurance requires consideration of several elements to ensure its effectiveness, sustainability, and ability to deliver client centric solutions that matches the need of the farmers. UNDP has clustered this into three foundational elements or building blocks (see Figure 1) that are required to build sustainable agricultural insurance markets: 

1. ·     Enabling Environment. The role of governments setting the policies, regulations, and incentives as smart subsidies are key to create a favorable environment for the insurance industry to step in the market to absorb the insurable risks from vulnerable smallholder farmers, communities, businesses, and countries against climate change, as insurance works as a risk transfer tool.   
2. ·    Market Foundations. In-country support services, as data and data analytics, actuarial capacities, risk modelling, value chain segmentation, and impact measurement are needed by the insurance industry to design client-centric agricultural insurance products and build sustainable business models. In-country technical capacities help building competitive resources that create the market disruptions for scale. Governments also benefit from the in-country services and technical capacities to inform the design of policies and regulations based on evidence. 
3. ·    Innovation Models. The need of making the business case of delivering agricultural insurance products for public and private service providers is important to go beyond pure distribution channels. Bundling insurance to farming inputs, loans, and climate services for example can help protecting the business model of service providers, building the business model for insurance companies to offer agricultural insurance products and offers distribution infrastructure for scaling solutions.

Across the three building blocks, quality data is a powerful resource to inform the design of national agricultural insurance policies, regulations, and programmes; to support the local insurance industry to develop client-centric agricultural insurance products; and to assess the impact of agricultural insurance products and programmes on improving top priority development outcomes as poverty reduction, financial resilience, and climate adaptation. However, national partners involved in development of agricultural insurance for smallholder farmers are in need of multiple data sources to design innovative solutions and are struggling in building own data sets, accessing historical data used for previous and current pilots or building sustainable business engagement with international and local data providers. 

The objective of this assignment is to: conduct high level research to identify existing key global, regional and national datasets and providers of data about livelihoods, agriculture and climate relevant for development of agriculture and climate insurance and/or climate adaptation solutions. Ideally accredited datasets by global reinsurers, development partners, government agencies, etc should be identified and used. As a part of the research, the contractor should identify and document examples of open/unified agro and climate data libraries along with its business model.