“Cottonsurance: Automated cotton insurance” aims at bringing an automated and affordable crop insurance solution to cotton growers, leveraging both satellite imagery analysis and mobile payment technologies.

The project combines complementary abilities of:

• Agcurate: an earth-observation company that provides accurate and timely rural intelligence to agribusiness; detecting fields, classifying crops, and predicting yield via satellite imagery analyses and
• OKO: a micro-insurance company analysing weather risks, designing insurance products and distributing them via mobile

For this pilot the focus will be on cotton growers in Mali, where OKO has an existing presence.

The consortium will design an index-insurance product based on rainfall data and satellite imagery analysis to protect farmers against droughts and floods. Besides crop classification, measure of yield loss will be estimated via an optimal selection of algorithms, indexes and data sources. This product will then be offered to smallholder cotton farmers in Mali via mobile thanks to OKO’s partnership with Orange and Allianz. Farmers will be informed along the season of the observed rainfall in their area and will be automatically compensated in case of adverse weather affecting their yield significantly.

By proving that such a product can work in Mali both for farmers and the insurance company, the consortium plans to set-up a model then replicable to other crops and other markets.