Helping Communities Manage risks from the ground up.

The MIA has recently responded to a request of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) - the government in exile of the Tibetan community in India, Nepal and Bhutan under the guidance of HH the Dalai Lama - to design and implement micro health insurance for over 100,000 Tibetan refugees living in India and Nepal. 

The idea underlying this project is to pick both natural and institutional households – e.g. families, monasteries and schools - as the units of affiliation in an innovative risk pooling mechanism which would provide sustainable resources to the network of health centers run by CTA's Department of Heath. The project also includes establishing better links with third-party secondary and tertiary healthcare providers chosen as referral hospitals. Links to the re-insurance industry will also be sought, with the view to re-insuring outlier risks, which would reduce exposure of the new system to extraordinarily expensive situations. Since its foundation in 1982, CTA's Department of Health provides healthcare within a severely limited and unstable international funding environment.  Thus, the reformed Tibetan “Medicare” system should provide free cover for destitute Tibetan refugees (around 10% of the refugee population), as well as high-impact, sustainable and responsive holistic health care coverage to the entire Tibetan population exiled in India and Nepal.  

Till now, the MIA and CTA have conducted a number of training of CTA cadres  and a feasibility study in 7 locations. Read more about this project here.