{"id":6193,"date":"2023-10-17T08:33:38","date_gmt":"2023-10-17T07:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"httpss:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/?p=6193"},"modified":"2025-04-08T07:47:04","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T07:47:04","slug":"new-podcast-with-ekhosuehi-iyahen-from-insurance-development-forum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/new-podcast-with-ekhosuehi-iyahen-from-insurance-development-forum\/","title":{"rendered":"Closing the protection gap \u2013 the Insurance Development Forum\u2019s Ekhosuehi Iyahen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><iframe title=\"Ep184 Ekhosuehi Iyahen Secretary General of the IDF: Putting valuable insurance knowledge to good use\" allowtransparency=\"true\" height=\"150\" width=\"100%\" style=\"border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);height:150px;\" scrolling=\"no\" data-name=\"pb-iframe-player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?i=r274g-14c79ad-pb&amp;from=pb6admin&amp;share=0&amp;download=1&amp;rtl=0&amp;fonts=Tahoma&amp;skin=3267a3&amp;font-color=&amp;logo_link=episode_page&amp;btn-skin=1b1b1b\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ekhosuehi Iyahen, secretary general of the Insurance Development Forum (IDF), was the latest guest to be interviewed on Mark Geoghegan\u2019s Voice of Insurance podcast.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Commercial insurance tends to do what it says on the tin \u2013 it\u2019s a business like any other in the sense that exists to make a profit. That said, ours is a sector based around the concept of trust, with a proud long and social history, and a societally useful role underwriting economic development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As Mark noted, his latest guest, Ekhosuehi Iyahen, secretary general at the Insurance Development Forum (IDF), is living proof that insurance can play a \u201csocially useful\u201d role \u2013 to coin a phrase used to criticise banking during the financial crisis. That\u2019s because her job is to harness the purpose of insurance for disaster risk financing in countries that can most benefit from it, first for the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, before joining the IDF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cNot many people understand the way insurance is able to blend these disciplines,\u201d said Iyahen. \u201cFor me, it&#8217;s been fascinating, as a space where I can interact with lawyers, geographers, geologists, engineers, finance people \u2013 all in a single day. We don&#8217;t often speak about the value of that multidisciplinary nature of the insurance industry and ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A public-private partnership, the IDF is led by the industry but co-chaired by NGOs such as the World Bank and UN. It\u2019s on a mission to optimise and extend the use of insurance and its related risk management capabilities to build greater resilience and protection for people, communities, businesses, and public institutions vulnerable to disasters and associated economic shocks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThis is an important mission, especially when you look at the news, what&#8217;s happening in Libya, Morocco, wildfires, everything around the world. It\u2019s about helping those communities and governments struggling with these kinds of shocks to understand the risks that they are faced with, and what they can do to create more resilient societies,\u201d Iahen said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s at the heart of the work that we do at the IDF. We focus on emerging markets and developing countries. It&#8217;s about bringing those capabilities that we think are relevant from the insurance industry towards what is a big challenge at the moment,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The focus of the IDF\u2019s secretariat is on implementation, she stressed, mobilising the industry to do what\u2019s necessary to close the protection gap between economic and insured losses, which is highest in developing countries, and in turn stymies or slows their development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Advocacy remains necessary because the public sector and other industries still lack awareness of the role of insurance in resilience building and socioeconomic development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cBut I think from our perspective, it&#8217;s probably more important to actually <em>do<\/em>,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Iyahen went on to emphasise the need not just to involve those at the very top of the industry, but brokers, agents and underwriters in the emerging markets they are trying to reach to drive change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt&#8217;s about people who are working, for example, in offices in Thailand, or in companies in Senegal, to understand the broader topics and how I can contribute, and how this converges with what I\u2019m trying to do in those countries,\u201d she continued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In practice, this firstly involves improving the availability of risk information to drive awareness, as well as strengthening capabilities open to emerging market risk professionals, by making tools available for them to take important risk-based decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This was a focus at the Glasgow COP26 Summit in 2021 for the \u2018V20\u2019 group of countries most vulnerable to climate change. The IDF constructed a channel to respond to this demand, which was backed with resources from the German government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt&#8217;s a bit of a misnomer, because it was actually 58 of the most vulnerable countries. It was a reaction to their expression of this need for support in deepening risk capabilities and the availability of tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Insurance can be a world-leader in building sustainability and resilience goals in relation to climate risk, Iyahen emphasised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThere is no better sector [than insurance] that should be supported in trying to advance this, even if it\u2019s from a self-interested perspective, in terms of how that feeds into product development,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ekhosuehi Iyahen, secretary general of the Insurance Development Forum (IDF), was the latest guest to be interviewed on Mark Geoghegan\u2019s Voice of Insurance podcast. Commercial insurance tends to do what it says on the tin \u2013 it\u2019s a business like any other in the sense that exists to make a profit. That said, ours is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6194,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,26],"tags":[10,14],"line-of-business":[20],"class_list":["post-6193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts","category-latest-insights","tag-exposure","tag-underwriting-workbench","line-of-business-property"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6193"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=6193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}