A new climate insurance programme known as the African and Asian Resilience in Disaster Insurance Scheme (ARDIS) has been launched by the VisionFund International (the microfinance subsidiary of development charity World Vision), Global Parametrics (a for-profit social venture, offering innovative risk management products that increase resilience and expedite recovery in emerging economies threatened by natural disasters and extreme weather events) and the InsuResilience Investment Fund. ARDIS, the world’s largest non-governmental climate insurance programme, aims to increase access to finance and provides post disaster recovery lending to rural families and smallholder farmers who live below the poverty. Africa and Asia are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and natural catastrophes. Thus, the scheme will be available in six countries in Africa and Asia, namely Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Zambia, Cambodia and Myanmar. ARDIS is expected to help over 690,000 families totalling up to 4 million uninsured people living in developing countries. The climate insurance programme will provide swift access to much-needed credit required by farmers and small businesses after a climate shock. Loans will be disbursed immediately during and after disasters to help clients maintain or restart economic activities. Michael Mithika (VisionFund International) said: “ARDIS uses an innovative financing structure making recovery lending scalable. This scalability means greater opportunities for more people to access emergency finance to restart businesses and restore incomes. We’ve already seen the benefits of recovery lending initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa in 2016/2017 which were supported by a £2 million returnable grant from DfID. We are excited about rolling this out on a wider scale.” The insurance scheme will effectively contribute to the InsuResilience initiative to increase access for around 400 million uninsured people in developing countries to insurance products that protect against climate risks, launched by G7 countries in 2015. The gLAWcal Team