Colombia

Treating clients with dignity and respect helps financial service providers adhere to both their social mission and financial goals. It is a “win-win”—the client is satisfied and the provider gains the client’s loyalty and continued business.  This dual advantage can motivate providers to improve their policies and procedures governing staff-client relations, including collections practices, ethical standards, complaints mechanisms, and staff training.

This Smart Note describes how Fundación Mundo Mujer Popayán developed a stronger pro-client attitude. The institution took time to listen to clients, collected their feedback and suggestions and used this information as guiding principles for developing new policies and procedures.  The result is a set of complementary policies, that, unlike previous material, use specific problem situations to address potential weaknesses in client protection practices.

This presentation discusses an innovative approach that was implemented in Colombia, with help from USAID and the Government of Colombia, in order to safely promote financial inclusion in Colombia while engaging the country’s private sector. Banca de Oportunidades was initially state-financed in order to get funding to rural under-served communities. Currently Banca de Oportunidades promotes market-based expansion of financial services, often through branchless banking.

MAPFRE and CODENSA, a major utility company, conducted a strategic alliance to distribute microinsurance products in Colombia since early 2001 to serve over 485,000 customers. 

"Protección CODENSA," the name given to the program, makes available to all CODENSA customers insurance products such as: funeral insurance, life insurance, personal, home and car accident, providing safeguard against the disastrous consequences that an unfortunate event could have. 

These products are specially designed to meet different customer needs and have the advantage of being paid through electricity bills. 

Key information about the program: 

• Currently, among the 485'183 CODENSA customers who have purchased insurance through the program, 81% are customers of layers 2-4. 
• 50% of program clients have a funeral insurance.
• More than 4300 services were provided through funeral insurance. 
• A hotline was created to answer all questions regarding insurance products and provide advice to clients when needed. 

With this partnership, MAPFRE and CODENSA hope to continue to provide excellent service and create new insurance products that meet customer needs at affordable prices for everyone.

Watch this video interview (in Spanish with English subtitles) to learn more about the project:

Drawing on the World Bank's Moving Out of Poverty dataset, this investigation explores the life stories of 125 women who have lived through violent political conflict in four countries: Colombia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka.  Two key findings emerged. First, the women living in communities directly affected by violent political conflict rated more highly on empowerment measures than the women living in communities that did not experience conflict. Second, once the violence drew to a close, the set of conflict-affected communities that experienced the most rapid recovery and poverty reduction were also characterized by more empowered women than the set of conflict-affected communities with lower rates of poverty reduction.

The life stories reveal that conflict and recovery, while bringing great suffering, also presented new opportunities for many women as traditional local structures, livelihoods, and gender norms were disrupted. During periods of violence, many women helped their households cope by diversifying and intensifying their economic activities. In the aftermath, they often continued to play more active economic roles as they struggled to recover and rebuild. In some cases, effective post-conflict reconstruction and development interventions created new opportunities for women to improve their livelihoods, access finance, join new groups, and, more rarely, become politically  engaged. In these ways, women often gained more independence and contributed actively to the recovery of their families and communities. The communities with both extensive poverty reduction and women's empowerment were characterized by reasonable levels of local security , access to active markets, and local governance that was adequate enough to attract and make good use of post-conflict aid.  The report presents broad recommendations for interventions that take advantage of a window for programming interventions that build on these positive but time-limited forces.

La Equidad Seguros was created 35 years ago as a cooperative with the mission to provide insurance services to cooperatives and their members, who were largely low-income workers outside the scope of traditional Colombian insurers. Today, La Equidad ranks 13th by level of premiums issued among 21 life insurers and 20th among all 29 insurers. At the end of 2004, its total premiums issued amounted to US$83 million.

Since its inception, La Equidad offered life protection coverage to cooperatives’ members, both as debtors and as savers. La Equidad’s group life insurance protected the cooperatives’ loan portfolio: The debt dies with the debtor was a common slogan of cooperatives, particularly credit unions. Members’ savings also had life insurance coverage in the case of death or permanent disability. La Equidad has continued to expand products for the lowerend of the market, particularly to specialized microfinance institutions and their clients. This case study focuses on these new activities.

This paper was commissioned by the “Good and Bad Practices in Microinsurance” project. Managed by the ILO’s Social Finance Programme for the CGAP Working Group on Microinsurance, this project is jointly funded by SIDA, DFID, GTZ, and the ILO.

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