As the Organisation of Eastern and Southern Africa Insurers (OESAI) gathers around the theme of building resilience through sustainable and inclusive markets, ZEP-RE Academy marks 10 years of building the people behind African insurance.
The timing is fitting. A decade of working with insurers, regulators, practitioners and development partners across the region has shown us that resilience is often more practical than the language around it suggests.
Resilience is often framed as a question of capital, regulation and product design. All these are important, but none is enough on its own.
A well capitalised insurer with a weak underwriting team will still misprice risk. A strong regulatory framework administered by supervisors who do not fully understand the products they oversee will still fall short of protecting policyholders. A promising product, poorly explained by intermediaries, will struggle to earn trust.
Markets do not become resilient by structure alone. They become resilient when the people running them keep learning as fast as the risks change. This is the perspective ZEP-RE Academy brings into its 10th year.
Since its establishment, the Academy has worked across Africa’s insurance ecosystem, supporting insurers, regulators, practitioners and development partners with the knowledge required to strengthen markets. That decade of work has shown us that capacity building is a strategic requirement for resilient insurance markets.
As the OESAI community reflects on sustainable and inclusive markets, three lessons from the Academy’s work are especially relevant.
First, the content of insurance capability has changed. When the Academy began, demand centred on core technical disciplines: underwriting, claims handling, reinsurance and actuarial practice. These remain foundational. No market can function without them.
But the risks African insurers are being asked to understand, price and carry have changed significantly. Climate risk, parametric insurance, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) integration and artificial intelligence are becoming core competencies. Institutions that continue to treat them as optional will find their technical teams a step behind the risks they are expected to underwrite.
This shift is visible in the Academy’s work on parametric solutions built around climate risk. Through the De-Risking, Inclusion and Value Enhancement of Pastoral Economies (DRIVE) project, index-based livestock insurance is helping protect pastoral communities across the Horn of Africa. Through the Grain for Premium project in Zambia, drought cover is supporting smallholder farmers trade by allowing premium to be paid in grain in line with harvest realities.
Both initiatives required underwriters and field teams to move beyond conventional indemnity thinking. They had to build fluency in satellite-derived indices, basis risk, parametric triggers and the realities of communities whose exposure to drought cannot be addressed by traditional products alone.
Christine Gitachu-Mungai is the Head of ZEP-RE Academy
Climate risk cannot remain a subject for reports and conferences only. It must be understood, priced, explained and covered. That requires people with current knowledge and practical judgement.
Second, resilience cannot be built by insurers alone. A resilient insurance market is created when capability is distributed across the system. An insurer can invest heavily in underwriting discipline. But that investment weakens if intermediaries cannot explain the products to customers, if regulators cannot keep pace with new product structures and distribution models, or if the policy environment moves more slowly than the market it is meant to govern.
This is why ZEP-RE Academy’s work has increasingly treated the ecosystem as the unit of change.
Our collaboration with East African Insurance Supervisors Association (EAISA) on research into mandatory classes of insurance is one example. Informing policy on compulsory cover requires regulators and industry to engage together. Training one side of the market and hoping the other catches up is not enough.
Somalia’s Takaful Bill offers another example. Supporting technical and structuring input into the Bill meant helping shape how takaful products could be licensed, supervised and distributed in a market without an existing framework for any of the three.
That kind of work shows that policy support is also capacity building. It strengthens not only the people who deliver insurance, but also the conditions that allow new forms of protection to take root.
Resilience held inside individual companies is fragile. Resilience shared across insurers, regulators, intermediaries and policymakers is durable.
Third, learning must become continuous. The clearest lesson from the past decade is that capability building cannot remain episodic. A course delivered once, however well designed, cannot keep pace with risks that change year after year. An industry that treats training as an event to be attended will always be catching up.
The Academy has built its practice around a different principle that learning must follow the market. That means reviewing programmes against the risks that practitioners are facing, updating content as products and regulations evolve, and keeping professionals engaged beyond formal training interventions. Continuous learning is not a slogan, but rather, it is a design principle. The industry has not yet fully absorbed what that requires.
The cost of ignoring continuous learning is significant. An industry that treats capability building as episodic will underwrite risks it does not fully understand, price products against assumptions that have gone stale, and lose the trust of customers and regulators once both notice the gap. Africa cannot afford a widening distance between the complexity of the risks it is trying to insure and the currency of the knowledge available to insure them.
For institutions investing in continuing professional development, three implications follow.
Training budgets must be planned around shorter knowledge cycles. Today’s core competencies will need refreshing within a few years, not decades. Risk is changing too quickly for technical capability to be treated as something updated only occasionally.
Capability investment must address the full value chain. Training underwriters, supervisors or intermediaries in isolation may strengthen individuals, but it will underperform if the wider ecosystem is not learning together. Market resilience depends on capability being developed across the system, not only within selected functions.
Learning must become part of institutional practice. It should be built into how organisations operate, rather than treated as a series of disconnected events on a calendar. The issue is not only whether people attend training, but whether institutions create the habits, systems and expectations that keep knowledge current.
These are not abstract recommendations. They are market development necessities. Africa’s insurance sector has never lacked ambition. What will determine whether that ambition becomes resilient markets is whether the people carrying it forward — underwriters, supervisors, intermediaries, actuaries and product developers — have the knowledge that keeps pace with the risks they manage. That is the work ZEP-RE Academy has committed itself to for the past 10 years. It is also the work we intend to deepen as the region’s risks continue to change.
The institutions that will shape Africa’s insurance markets over the next decade will not necessarily be those with the most capital. They will be those whose people keep learning as fast as the risks around them change. That is the commitment ZEP-RE Academy carries into its second decade.
For 10 years, the Academy has helped strengthen the people behind African insurance. In the decade ahead, that work becomes even more urgent. As risks evolve, products become more complex and markets seek to become more inclusive, the industry’s resilience will depend on the depth, relevance and continuity of its knowledge.
The markets that endure will be shaped by people whose knowledge keeps pace with risk.
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