How British Insurers Have Become an Improbable Force for Good / Telegraph

 Even before climate change life was precarious for those living beside Zambia’s biggest and oldest national park, Kafue, a challenging seven-hour drive west of Lusaka.

There is no asphalt or tarmac here, just unpaved tracks through the bush. There is no running water or mains electricity, just occasional solar panels. The people live in thatched mud huts. Their children play barefoot in the dirt. They raise cows, goats and chickens, and grow maize and pumpkins in the deep red earth. Theirs is a hand-to-mouth existence in a subsistence economy.

But now, to compound their hardships, the rains are no longer dependable or predictable: this winter’s deluges have followed three years of extreme drought.

Droughts shrivel crops, but they bring another hazard to the villagers’ lives. They force Kafue’s elephants, lions, leopards and hyenas to seek food and water in populated areas surrounding the park. They attack livestock, trample maize fields, strip mango trees, plunder grain stores and destroy wells and homes. They frequent the same river banks and water holes as humans, sometimes killing or injuring them. 

During a day spent jolting in a four-wheel drive between the settlements on Kafue’s eastern flank, I met any number of villagers who had suffered from what conservationists call Human Wildlife Conflicts (HWCs).

Duncan Shing’andu, 46, lowered his trousers to show me the half-dozen livid blue weals on his left hip where a lion attacked him as he sought to protect his cattle last August: he is now lame, with his ability to work seriously impaired. 

Victor Shantebe, 54, was seized by a crocodile while fishing in late 2024. His right arm was lacerated, and his five children went hungry because he could not work for six months. Ted Munakaloale, 53, showed me where a hyena bit deep into his arm as he tried to stop it killing his cows one night last autumn. 

Since June sixteen people have been killed by wild animals in areas abutting Kafue, and the villagers often respond by killing the predators. “It’s our culture, our tradition,” said Shing’andu, who shot dead one of the two lions that attacked his cattle and wounded the one who mauled him.

They also resent the rangers who seek to protect the predators, sometimes chasing them away with stones. The villagers see only the costs of conservation, not the benefits. “There’s a perception that we’re more protective of wildlife than people,” says Britius Munkombwe, a senior ranger. “The more we protect wildlife the more problems the people face.”

I have come to investigate a pioneering scheme with the potential to change that. It is called Wild Cover - one of 18 diverse pilot projects that have been launched in 17 developing countries by Charlie Langdale, an insurance executive who works 5,000 miles away amid the gleaming glass towers of the City of London.

The projects all aim to use specially-designed insurance policies and modern technology to help the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people cope with the consequences of the climate change that they did nothing to engender: droughts, floods, cyclones and extreme heat.

Rather than reacting to disasters and sending in loss adjusters to wrangle with the victims, as most conventional insurance policies do, these bespoke policies all offer swift, guaranteed, preemptive payouts as soon as alarms are triggered by real time satellite data.

Those payments provide a safety net that prevents the beneficiaries falling into a cycle of poverty and debt, and give them the confidence to invest in the future. 

“It’s the poor who are facing the brunt of climate change,” says Langdale, head of Humanity Insured, the charitable fund backed by 11 of the City’s largest insurance companies that is financing those projects. “Why is insurance a benefit enjoyed only by the wealthy? There are billions of people in the world who are on the front line of climate change with no access to insurance at all.”

Wild Cover was dreamed up by Barbara Chesire, 41, the effervescent Kenyan head of AB Entheos, a Nairobi-based company that devises insurance solutions for environmental problems, and to get the project off the ground she procured two years of funding worth $500,000 from Humanity Insured.

It works like this. She has put $200,000 of that grant into a pot to compensate roughly 100,000 villagers living in an area of 3,000 square kilometres on Kafue’s eastern flank for any losses they suffer as a result of Human Wildlife Conflicts. 

She has spent a further $40,000 on a bespoke ‘parametric’ insurance policy that will pay up to $300,000 more if satellite data shows forage and water levels in the national park falling 35 per cent below the average, forcing its wildlife to venture beyond its boundaries in search of food and water.

The payouts are pre-determined. For a goat or a sheep killed by predators villagers receive $25, and for a cow $200. For property damaged by elephants the maximum payout is $200, and for crop damage $300 per hectare. Injured humans receive up to $420 for medical treatment, and the families  of those killed get $625 for funeral expenses.

But the payouts are conditional. Crucially, the villagers must not retaliate by killing the elephants, lions or other predators. They must be living in permitted areas of the protected lands around Kafue, and not encroaching on those set aside for wildlife. They must be engaged in legal activities, not poaching. 

They must also seek to protect their livestock through measures partially financed by Humanity Insured’s grant - building predator-proof kraals (enclosures) for their cattle, for example, or deploying drums, firecrackers, chilli powder and ‘fences’ made of beehives to ward off elephants.

The villagers must report their losses within 24 hours using one of the basic $20 Chinese mobile phones that most of them possess. One of Wild Cover’s five Community Verification Officers (CVOs) then visit the scene on a motorbike within six hours - conditions permitting. They take photos, obtain a witness statement, and check the victim had taken preventative measures. Approved claims are paid to the victim’s mobile wallet within days.

The beauty of the project is that everybody wins, at least in theory. The villagers are for the first time being compensated for their losses: since the scheme began last June Wild Cover has approved 165 claims and paid $37,680 in compensation. The wild animals are protected from retaliatory killings. Rangers are no longer seen as the enemy, illegal land use is discouraged and the insurance company gets business. 

There are teething problems. Spreading the word to poorly-educated villagers scattered over such a huge area is hard (the rangers and CVOs use a specially-designed Monopoly-style board game called ResilientME! to explain to the villagers how Wild Covid works, and what the benefits and pitfalls are).  The mobile network is also patchy (people sometimes have to walk miles, or climb trees and ant hills, to get a signal). And inevitably, a few have submitted false claims.

Looking ahead, a bigger problem is that either the Zambian government, or the tourist and conservation industries, or the villagers themselves will be required to finance the scheme once it is firmly established: to date, the impoverished villagers have been understandably reluctant to pay even a token insurance premium when they see rich white folk flying in to Kafue’s luxury lodges to enjoy the very same wildlife that destroys their livelihoods.

But anecdotal evidence suggests the project is already beginning to erode the villagers’ age-old enmity towards the wild animals - and those that protect them.

“We’re friendlier now with the wild animals,” says Faidas Muchindu, 28, a mother of two young children who received $175 after an elephant rampaged through her vegetable patch one night last autumn, leaving her family without food.

“We’ve killed wild animals in the past, but now we’ve stopped,” says Herbert Chitungu, who received $400 after hyenas killed two of his cows last October. 

Britius Munkombwe says the scheme has made life easier for his rangers because “they are no longer perceived as enemies of the people”. Sport Beattie, head of Game Rangers International,  the Scottish-based company which runs the ranger force, says people are now applying to be rangers, which they never did before, and he foresees a time when “it will be like ‘how did we never have this’. Chesire says the government is now thinking of expanding the scheme to other parts of Zambia.

I visit Chief Shezongo, the villagers’ leader, in his ‘palace’ - a compound in a clearing that is ringed by a corrugated iron fence and contains several thatched huts for his wives and many children. We are told to kneel and clap three times before entering his Spartan concrete ‘office’ with its glassless windows, and to repeat that courtesy inside.

The 83-year-old monarch sits at a rickety wooden desk and smiles benignly, but says little. His ‘chief secretary’, Mubita Kaongolo, speaks for him. He says the conflicts between elephants and the area’s fast-growing human population had become “very, very dangerous”, and people spent sleepless nights trying to frighten them away. But thanks to Wild Cover “they no longer regard them as enemies and no longer kill predators on the spot. Today they have learned to co-exist”. 

He tells Chesire: “We urge you to continue, to continue, to continue.”

****

I meet Charlie Langdale in a very different sort of ‘palace’: the plush 14th floor headquarters of the Howden insurance group with its fine art, expensive furniture and vertiginous views of the City of London. 

The modern insurance industry originated from ancient risk-sharing practices among traders and evolved into a formal, data-driven sector in 17th-century London following major disasters, perhaps most notably the Great Fire of London. By pooling resources and calculating risks, it provided the vital financial security necessary for maritime expansion, urban growth, and industrial innovation. 

Langdale, 52, a wiry bundle of energy who paraglides for relaxation, had worked for 25 years for Howden when, in 2021, he had the idea of taking insurance to the developing world in order to help boost economic growth.

He heard Mia Mottley, the Barbadian prime minister, deliver a passionate call to arms at Glasgow’s Cop26 climate change summit, and asked himself how insurance could help the 3.6 billion impoverished people living on the front line of climate change.

He realised that the rich world - North America, Europe and Japan - presently accounted for nearly 90 per cent of all insurance policies, and Africa barely three per cent. He also realised that conventional policies, with their complex application forms, loss adjusters and slow, contested payments, would not work in the developing world in any case.

So he seized on the idea of ‘parametric insurance’ whereby satellites trigger automatic, pre-emptive, preset payments whenever they detect the extreme climatic conditions that cause droughts, floods and extreme heat.   

David Howden, the company’s founder, backed the idea. He suggested Langdale form an independent charity in which Howden, the company, would have no commercial interest. He agreed to pay Humanity Insured’s running costs, and helped him enlist the support of ten other big London insurance companies including Allianz and AXA XL.

Humanity Insured was formally launched in October 2024 with funds of £10 million. Sixteen months on, it has distributed £2.8 million to the non-profit and community groups running those 18 pilot projects around the world. Those groups have since bought tailor-made insurance policies offering up to £44 million of protection to 2.1 million people.

In the Indian state of Gujarat, for example, Humanity Insured subsidises a bespoke insurance policy purchased by a small local cooperative, the Mahila Housing Trust, to protect 26,000 women labouring in markets or building sites against extreme heat. 

When temperatures exceed 43 degrees celsius the policy pays them the equivalent of their daily wage not to work, thereby protecting their health and ability to support their families. The women themselves each pay the equivalent of 65p each towards the premium - about 20 per cent - during the hot season.

In Kenya increasingly uncertain rains create a Catch-22 situation: smallholders cannot get loans to buy solar pumps to irrigate their crops because the lenders, Sun Culture, cannot be sure of getting their money back if those crops fail. Humanity Insured is therefore subsidizing an insurance policy covering 15,000 subsistence farmers that makes instant payouts to their mobile phones in the event of drought so they can be sure of making their repayments.

In South Sudan Humanity Insured is helping develop a project whereby satellites will automatically trigger insurance payouts to a local NGO, the Titi Foundation, if they record unusually high rainfall over Lake Victoria. 

Those payouts will be used to prepare the pastoralists who graze their cattle beside the Nile for the floods that will inevitably arrive a fortnight later - whether through vaccinations against waterborne diseases, sandbagging their homes or moving their food to safe places.

Elsewhere Humanity Insured is helping provide insurance to smallholders, stallholders, flood victims, displaced people, coastal communities and others in Malawi, Togo, Senegal, Syria, Cambodia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Nepal.

In theory, at least, this insurance will give the beneficiaries the confidence to take out loans, plant all their seeds each year instead of holding half in reserve, and send their children to school knowing they will be able to pay the costs even if disaster strikes.

“It’s a safety net that allows them to invest in the future,” says Langdale, and it is certainly generating interest. Humanity Insured is helping develop at least 50 more such projects. It aims to be spending £20 million a year by 2030 on projects that will together offer more than a £1 billion in pre-emptive coverage to 30 million desperately poor people.

That £20 million, Langdale argues, is a fraction of the cost of helping the victims of droughts, floods or famines through conventional humanitarian relief methods after the event. “That is the power of insurance,” he says. It leverages small sums into huge sums.

Langdale strenuously rejects the charge that this is so much ‘greenwashing’ or ‘conscience-salving’, or an attempt by an unpopular industry to improve its image. 

He sees insurance as a force for good. He accepts that insurance companies will profit from the projects, but argues that “insurance is a tool which can benefit many millions of people around the world, and we should use every tool in the box (to do that).” Moreover, he adds, “the effect on the ground is real, not fake. It’s actually happening.”

Neliswa Hare agrees. She is Humanity Insured’s head of projects, and grew up in the deprived Johannesburg township of Alexandra where insurance was practically unknown. She believes that everyone should have access to the sort of insurance that the West takes for granted. “Withholding it is an injustice.”

The projects’ success depends, crucially, on them proving their worth so that people buy into them en masse and the premiums drop to a level that even those earning barely $2 a day can afford. They could thus become largely self-sustainable once Humanity Insured withdraws its subsidies in, say, three years’ time.

That is a tall order in Zambia, where Wild Cover must win the trust of thousands of very poor, ill-educated people scattered over a vast, remote area and raised from birth to regard wild animals as enemies.

But there are promising signs, Chief Shezongo’s encouragement aside. Duncan Shing’andu received no payout because he killed the lion that attacked his cattle. He begs Barbara Chesire to reconsider, saying he did not understand the rules, regretted his action and would in future summon the rangers to deal with predators rather than pick up his gun. 

“It’s a good scheme and it really helps,” he tells me. “We have to protect our wild animals and our domestic animals, and this is a way of doing so.” Others might still resist, he adds, but he would now be willing to pay a small premium.