Insurance That Pays Out Before the Farmer Asks
Satellite-backed parametric crop insurance infrastructure for insurers, reinsurers, and donor-funded index insurance programs.
Traditional crop insurance is broken for smallholders.
Claims adjustment is too expensive to underwrite. Adverse selection collapses risk pools. Moral hazard turns insurance into income transfer. Premiums become unaffordable. Farmers stop buying. Insurers exit the market.
Parametric insurance — where payouts trigger automatically based on measurable indices — solves these problems in principle. In practice, the indices have historically been too crude (rainfall stations are too sparse, regional triggers don't reflect field-level reality), the data infrastructure too fragmented, and the validation too contentious.
What We Provide
Production-grade index data and trigger infrastructure
KurimaSense supplies the satellite-derived indices, ground-truth validation, and trigger logic that make parametric crop insurance economically viable at smallholder scale.
How we work together
Engagements scale with the depth of modelling you need — from standard reporting through to bespoke prediction models — not by seat count. We scope and price each one on a short briefing call.
Core
Index Data Service
NDVI, NDMI, SAR backscatter, and custom composite indices delivered as time series per insured area or per field.
- Daily indices during the growing season
- Per-area or per-field granularity
- Historical baselines included
- API access
- Standard reporting
Standard
Trigger Verification
Automated trigger verification with documented thresholds, audit trails, and dispute-resolution data, on top of the Index Data Service.
- Everything in Core
- Automated trigger verification
- Full audit trail
- Dispute-resolution documentation
- Reinsurance-grade reporting
Enterprise
Custom Index Design
An engagement to design crop- and region-specific composite indices and loss models tailored to your products.
- Bespoke index design
- Crop & region-specific calibration
- Custom loss-prediction modelling
- Validation against historical loss data
- Actuarial collaboration
- Ongoing index maintenance
How it works
Define the insured product
Together we specify what's insured — crop, region, growing window, peril (drought, flood, biomass loss). We translate that into measurable indices.
Establish baselines
Historical satellite data establishes long-term baselines per crop per Natural Region — what does a normal season look like? What does a 1-in-10-year drought look like in measurable index terms?
Set triggers
Triggers are set as deviations from baseline (e.g., NDMI below 20th percentile of historical record for the same period and location for 4 consecutive weeks). Triggers are transparent, mathematical, and auditable.
Live monitoring
During the season, indices are tracked in real time. Insured parties and the insurer both have visibility.
Automated trigger and payout
When triggers fire, payouts execute automatically per your terms. No claims process. No adjustment. No dispute about whether the loss occurred.
What you receive
- Production index data feed (daily during growing season)
- Trigger verification reports with full audit trail
- Historical baselines per crop per region
- Visualization layer for policyholders and your underwriting team
- Reinsurance-grade documentation for risk transfer
- Quarterly index performance reviews
Who uses this
Parametric crop insurance is one of the fastest-growing categories in African agricultural finance, driven by: African Risk Capacity (ARC) sovereign-level parametric programs; World Bank-supported smallholder index insurance pilots; donor-funded climate resilience programs requiring measurable trigger infrastructure; commercial insurers seeking scalable smallholder products; reinsurers requiring independent index verification.
Why composite indices reduce basis risk
Single-index parametric products (rainfall-only, or NDVI-only) suffer from basis risk — the gap between what the index measures and what the farmer actually experiences. KurimaSense's composite index approach, combining optical and SAR signals with ground-truth calibration, reduces basis risk substantially compared to traditional single-source approaches.
Read our methodology
Technical documentation covering basis risk, trigger design, historical baseline construction, and reinsurance-grade documentation.
Download PDFSchedule a conversation
Bring your actuarial and product leads — we'll show you index performance for a region of your choosing.
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