Africa’s largest general insurer, Santam Limited, has partnered with the South African Weather Service (SAWS) to improve the country’s weather forecasting and early warning capabilities by sponsoring the installation of nine automatic weather stations (AWS) at various locations countrywide.
As luck would have it, the official announcement, made in Johannesburg on May 7, 2026, coincided with exactly the type of extreme weather that communities and underwriters need to be made aware of.
In the days leading up to the event, parts of the Eastern Cape and Western Cape saw heavy rainfall, with multiple weather stations recording well over 100 millimetres in a 24-hour period. And on the day, Johannesburg and Pretoria were in the grip of a cold snap, with temperatures below the early winter average.
Rudzani Malala, an executive at SAWS, was on hand to name the culprit, saying that South Africans were experiencing a cut-off low-pressure system. This is a weather phenomenon where a high-level, low-pressure system detaches from the predominant air flow. The intense, slow-moving system can persist over an area for several days, causing extreme cold, heavy rainfall and flooding.
Thabiso Rulashe, head of strategy and investor relations at Santam Limited, said there is a human element to climate volatility.
“South Africa is experiencing stronger floods and storms, longer duration droughts and rising wildfire risks; but beyond the statistics, these events disrupt communities, destroy livelihoods and erase years of development progress,” he said.
Climate risk in focus
The rising frequency and severity of extreme weather events was described as both an insurance and societal issue, with all presenters acknowledging that extreme weather events cause significant damage to critical public infrastructure in addition to impacting lives, livelihoods and private property.
There have been a number of severe flood events recorded in South Africa and its neighbouring Southern African Development Community countries over the past five years. The April 2022 KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) floods stand out for their sheer scale, causing economic damages of around R50 billion (US$3.1 billion in 2022) and insured losses of R20 billion (US$1.2 billion). Santam fielded claims totalling R5.5 billion (US$336 million) following that event.
By contrast, the insurer fielded around R300 million (US$18 million in 2026) in claims following flooding in Limpopo and Mpumalanga in January 2026. Insurers across South Africa reported benign flood-related claims in 2024 and 2025 despite some significant events.
There is another challenge which African insurance stakeholders are all too familiar with, namely the gap between economic and insured losses. In the KZN example, insured losses represented around 40% of the total economic loss; but this ratio is often at 20% or lower.
Narrowing protection gap through collaboration
Rulashe said that all stakeholders would have to work together to create affordable insurance solutions, and drive the uptake of these solutions, to narrow the gap.
“The nine AWS that Santam has sponsored are a welcome addition to our observational infrastructure; they have already been installed and integrated into our network,” said Malala, later acknowledging the contribution as a prime example of what public private partnership can do for the communities and the economy.
Overall, the country now boasts 276 AWS, 211 automatic rainfall stations, 26 lightning detection network sensors, 25 climate stations and 12 meteorological radar systems, among other equipment.
“This is the infrastructure on which the country relies to be able to ensure that every person in our communities is protected from hazardous weather events through life-saving early warning systems,” Malala said.
“Climate change is already shaping the economy and our communities, that is why Santam has partnered with SAWS to strengthen South Africa’s early warning and weather forecasting capabilities … to ensure communities have the information they need to act before disaster strikes. Early warnings protect lives, livelihoods and local economies,” Rulashe said.
Historically, many of the lives lost during flooding are due to motorists or pedestrians attempting to cross flooded rivers. The hope is that a widely communicated early warning can counter this. Malala recounted how government leadership in parts of Limpopo and Mpumalanga responded to SAWS extreme weather warnings by suspending schooling to mitigate the risks that learners faced when commuting to and from schools.
Leaning on early warning systems
The next step is to ensure that early warnings are communicated more broadly, and reach as many affected people as possible. In this regard, SAWS has already started discussions with the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) on a location-based cellular public-warning system.
The Santam-SAWS partnership is part of a wider shift in insurance. As floods, droughts, storms and wildfires become harder to predict and price, insurers and reinsurers are leaning more heavily on geospatial tools and high-resolution satellite imagery to inform underwriting decisions. Better data, such as that gathered by SAWS, is becoming central to how the industry understands and responds to climate volatility.
Although off to a solid start, South Africa will have to invest billions of rand to build a weather monitoring infrastructure adequate to live up to the United Nations Early Warnings for All (EW4All) initiative. The initiative, which launched in 2022, aims to ensure every person on Earth is protected by multi-hazard early warning systems against extreme weather and climate events by the end of 2027.
Enormous investments needed
South Africa was the first G20 country to launch a national EW4All Roadmap, doing so on the sidelines of the G20 Disaster Risk Reduction Ministerial Meeting held in the Western Cape in October 2025. Malala described the document as “a strategic guide to drive initiatives from national to local spheres of government, and channel investments towards enhancing early warning systems for more effective disaster risk reduction.”
He estimated at least R1 billion (US$60 million) would have to be invested in early warning and disaster risk reduction infrastructure over the short term, but conceded that it would be difficult to fully execute South Africa’s roadmap by next year, with 2029 a more realistic target.
Weather monitoring infrastructure does not come cheap, from upper-air radiosonde releases using helium- or hydrogen-filled weather balloons, to meteorological radar systems costing tens of millions of rand, and computing system upgrades requiring funding measured in the hundreds of millions. Your writer had a wry chuckle here: being the weather service and all, they might yet save on compute costs by turning to the cloud.
In the post-launch press release, Tavaziva Madzinga, the Santam Group CEO, said the strategic partnership with SAWS will play a critical role in enhancing disaster risk management in the country. The insurer framed the partnership in the context of building resilience, and its belief that preventing loss is as important as paying claims.
“Early warnings enable early action,” Rulashe concluded. “When people receive credible, timely forecasts, they can delay travel, secure property, move vehicles and protect agricultural assets. In so doing, they reduce exposure, minimise losses and continue to build resilience.” This is a win-win for communities and insurers alike.