In a significant step towards deepening agricultural resilience across Nigeria, Leadway Assurance Company Limited has entered into a strategic partnership with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) through a $399,900 grant initiative to implement the “Building Farmers’ Resilience through Innovative Insurance Models and Financial Instruments” project.

AGRA is an African institution supporting inclusive agricultural transformation and sustainable food systems. This three-year initiative, running from March 2025 to March 2028, aims to transform the livelihoods of 21,000 smallholder farmers (SHFs) across Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Niger States.

Climate change continues to escalate risks for Nigerian farmers, manifesting in unpredictable rainfall, prolonged droughts, extremely high lethal temperatures and increased crop failure. This volatility threatens national food security/systems and undermines years of agricultural progress. Recognising the scale of this challenge, Leadway Assurance has taken a bold step forward, championing innovative risk management strategies tailored to the realities of rural agriculture.

At the heart of the new intervention is the “Pay at Harvest” insurance scheme, an innovative premium collection model that enables farmers to defer insurance payments until after harvest, when liquidity is more assured. This approach lowers the financial barriers to insurance enrollment, increases uptake among SHFs, and embeds resilience within the agricultural value chain.

“Pay at Harvest” empowers farmers to protect their livelihoods without upfront costs, ensuring they can bounce back from climate-related losses and secure credit, inputs, and market access with greater confidence.

This new grant builds upon Leadway Assurance’s successful three-year partnership with Heifer International, under which over 60,000 smallholder farmers benefited from the “Pay at Harvest” model.

The current AGRA-funded and sponsored project goes a step further by offering a more holistic package, including access to off-takers and market linkages, extension services and climate-smart agronomy support, digital mapping of farmlands for enhanced monitoring and accountability, timely early warning systems for extreme weather events, scalable farmer education programs to promote financial literacy and climate-smart practices, and expanding public-private collaborations for unlocking innovative finance, including green climate finance, for crop insurance.

To deliver on this ambitious vision, Leadway Assurance will work alongside expert partners, Verdure Climate – supporting climate risk analytics, PULA – offering tech-enabled agricultural insurance solutions, Rural Country Integrated Services Ltd. – field implementation partner, National Agricultural Development Fund (NADF) and Heifer International – unlocking catalytic finance for SHFs.

By 2028, the initiative also aims to facilitate $10 million in agricultural credit, launch 6 new financial products tailored to smallholder farmer needs and disseminate 4 knowledge products to drive broader sectoral adoption.

Commenting on the initiative, Head, Agribusiness, Leadway Assurance, Mr. Fatona Ayoola described the partnership with AGRA as a decisive moment for agricultural risk management in Nigeria. “By bringing bespoke parametric insurance solutions to underserved communities who are vulnerable to the negative impact of climate change and aligning them with broader value chain interventions, we are not only protecting livelihoods but also rebuilding trust in farming as a viable business for rural Nigerians.”

According to Dr. Rufus Idris, Country Director at AGRA,“For Nigeria’s agricultural transformation and food security efforts to succeed amid increased climate uncertainty, insurance needs to work better in helping smallholder farmers protect their farmlands and crops from climate change shocks (flood, draught, pest and diseases, etc.). Hence, this project aims to help build on a proven model and catalyze resources for a wider access to insurance and adoption by smallholder farmers”.