Our mission is to empower communities to play an active role in insurance while uplifting themselves out of poverty, through sustainable operations of community-based micro health insurance schemes. To achieve this, we operate under the following guiding principles when engaging with poor communities:

Subsidiarity:

The notion that management of local activities, like community-based micro health insurance schemes, should be performed by members of the community to the fullest extent possible. In other words, whatever can be done at the level closest to the ground (community), should be done there. Only what cannot be done at community level should be escalated to the next level, and so on. We design our methodologies to promote self-management that builds on the existing social structures of communities to ensure a supportive “bottom-up” strategy, with the community in charge.

Mutuality: 

The principle that members of mutual organizations, like community members of microinsurance units, derive their rights to profits and votes through their relationship rather than by contributing capital to the company through direct investment. Mutual organizations exist for the sole benefit of their members. Any profits the mutual organization makes are usually re-invested to expand the services received by members, or used to ensure the organization remains financially sustainable.

Solidarity:

Related to the previous concept of mutuality, solidarity is the principle of harnessing community-based democratic action to strengthen capacity in meeting the basic needs of community members. For microinsurance units this means the election of community members to represent, manage, and carry out the roles usually performed by traditional insurance schemes. These mutuality and solidarity models are already well established at the grassroots level, and we propose harnessing them for the introduction, design and operation of microinsurance.

Sustainability:

A pillar of social and economic development, this principle advocates a system that can be maintained at a certain productive level indefinitely. One of the first and oft-cited definitions of sustainability created by the Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as “meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

For a microinsurance unit, the application of this principle implies that an MIU should be able to survive free from dependence on external financial support while accommodating new community members. To achieve this, our quantitative measures of sustainability include social factors from the earliest stages of their design. This creates an infrastructure that enables community members to balance income, willingness to pay, and cost of care.