OneFamily has announced plans to work with the ICMIF Foundation and UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) to help fight rural poverty and increase gender equality.
The ICMIF Foundation works to support mutual and cooperative insurers in providing inclusive insurance products that protect people in low-income, vulnerable communities from extreme poverty.
The charity was formed by the International Cooperative and Mutual Insurance Federation (ICMIF), which OneFamily is a member of.
Since 2015, the ICMIF Foundation has supported insurers in emerging markets to provide a safety net for over three million low-income households through insurance and resilience building.
“This project plays to our strengths and our mutual roots of putting people first,” said OneFamily CEO, Jim Islam. “It’s about humanity and supporting others as they grow their resilience – irrespective of where they live.”
OneFamily is specifically supporting the UNDP ICMIF Insurance Innovation Challenge (IIC). The call for applications in 2023 asked for innovative mutual or cooperative insurance schemes that could benefit from ICMIF’s financial and technical support.
The four winning projects all work with grassroots communities to co-create risk models with local people, with a particular focus on increasing financial resilience in women in developing countries.
As a mutual society, this cooperative approach fits well with OneFamily’s belief that individuals should have the option to build their own resilience and the tools to protect themselves financially.
“It’s important to understand and respond to what’s happening in our own backyard, and we will continue to do this,” said Jim. “But we also need to recognise that inequality is a global problem and that we are part of that very same global community.
We can’t close our eyes to what happens beyond our boundary fence.”
