Season's greetings from the A2ii!

Dear friends and colleagues, 

I wish to begin this year’s end message by thanking the A2ii Secretariat team for their energy and unwavering dedication to the vision of Access to Insurance Initiative – that more poor and vulnerable people have access to and use affordable insurance appropriate for their needs.  

We have seen this dedication translated in A2ii’s strengthened support for insurance supervisors, in forming new multistakeholder partnerships and building global peer communities and finally, creating enabling regulatory environments for inclusive insurance.  

One of the ways in which this growth is visible is through our Inclusive Insurance Regulations map – which now shows more than 35 jurisdictions with regulations enabling inclusive insurance, as compared to just six in 2009!

We continued our work on promoting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), building off the work done. We focused on where we believe insurance can have the most impact,  SDG 1 – No Poverty, SDG 5 – Gender Equality, SDG 9 – Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure and SDG 13 – Climate Action. . 

A highlight of the year was the launch of two gender modules (SDG 5 – gender equality), which are now publicly available on the Connect.A2ii platform. The two modules are developed within the larger project Empowering Supervisors to Improve Women’s Access to Insurance, supported by the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC). In the framework of the project, gender has also been given a higher profile in the trainings that we conduct, and a gender lens has been mainstreamed into all A2ii activities.  

The Connect.A2ii platform has grown into a product that not only delivers knowledge and trainings, but has evolved into something that connects insurance supervisors worldwide for peer exchange and discussion. This year, three trainings were delivered through the platform, and all received solid positive feedback. We will increase our offerings in 2023 including opportunities for French and Spanish speaking supervisors. Above and beyond the opportunities offered during live trainings, the A2ii now offers self-directed trainings, greatly broadening the number of supervisors who are able to receive training on important topics. 

Another accomplishment from this year is the work of the third Inclusive Insurance Innovation Lab (iii-lab) with a focus on climate (SDG 13), which wrapped up with four exciting prototypes developed by the multi-stakeholder country teams from Costa Rica, Grenada, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. We also were able to resume some in-person activities, with participants from all three iii-lab programmes and invited guests uniting for the International Dialogue event in Frankfurt in September. 

As we cross into 2023, we hope for more in-person encounters with supervisors and our partners, to build new relationships and strengthen the existing ones.  

In the meantime, from all of us at the A2ii team, we send you warm wishes for a festive holiday season to those who celebrate, and our heartfelt wishes for a prosperous new year.

Hannah Grant, Head of the A2ii Secretariat