The challenge of how insurance of property and assets can be relevant and affordable to low-income communities has triggered a number of micro-insurance initiatives over the last two decades (UNISDR, 2009 and 2011). Some of these instruments, such as index-based crop insurance schemes, have enjoyed remarkable success across the globe. However, even these targeted programmes rarely reached the most vulnerable of low-income populations—those with no land or productive assets to insure.

An innovative partnership between Swiss Re., a major global reinsurance company, the UN World Food Programme, and Oxfam, a large international development organisation, is testing and developing a new set of integrated tools to reach some of the most vulnerable populations in Africa. Building on the success of HARITA, the first micro-insurance scheme to offer poor farmers to pay for crop insurance with their own labour, the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative seeks to improve approaches to targeting and financing to mature the programme into a commercially viable option that is accessible to the poorest. Success will depend on a number of factors, not least the functioning of the partnership between public and private actors in this scheme. To date, although these innovations have shown promising results in reaching farmers for which normal insurance schemes are out of reach, such programmes have had to rely on heavily subsidised premiums and have not yet been scaled up to a level that would prove their viability and sustainability.

Secure energy supply is crucial for some agribusiness activities, as energy is necessary to operate pumps in irrigation systems, ventilators in poultry farms, cooling systems for the storage of some fresh food such as milk and meat, etc.

In 2000, about 10 million or 80 percent of smallholder farmers in Brazil had no access to public power supply (Government of Brazil, 2010). From 2003 to 2010, the government invested heavily to change this, and by 2010, the budget for this initiative had reached R$20 billion (Ibid.). By September 2011, 14.2 million people had been reached. ^xv Hand-in-hand with this investment, a new policy on the creation of Production Community Centres, in which private investment was sought and supported, was established.