In Costa Rica, Climate Risk Insurance (CRI) is recognised as a key tool for reducing the impact of climate and disaster risks on rural women. Aligned with the country’s Request for Support to the Global Shield against Climate Risks, Costa Rica has prioritised stimulating demand for and supply of CRI for vulnerable populations. In response to gender related components in the Request for Support, the Centre of Excellence on Gender-smart Solutions in collaboration with the General Superintendence of Insurance (SUGESE), hosted two sessions on gender-responsive Climate and Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance (CDRFI) in the country to raise awareness and build capacity for inclusive climate risk insurance.
The first awareness session took place on 15 October 2025 at the National Forum of Rural Women of Costa Rica, hosted by the National Women’s Institute (INAMU), where 89 rural women leaders from 29 different rural provinces came together to share their demand-side perspectives on climate risks and existing coping mechanisms, and learn about how CRI may help address their protection needs. Building on these discussions, on 17 October 2025, a half-day supply-side training workshop was held in partnership with SUGESE in San Jose, targeting the insurance sector, regulatory bodies, and national institutions and was attended by 28 representatives. This workshop sought to build the business case for inclusive CRI solutions in the country.
From the interaction, emerging insights from rural women in Costa Rica on their needs and constraints indicate a demand for inclusive CRI targeting this vulnerable market segment, as well as for certain potential features of CRI products. The findings are summarised below:
Rural women face both direct and indirect impacts from climate-induced disasters affecting their lives and agricultural livelihoods.
Most women in rural territories are active in the coffee value chain, which serves as their primary source of livelihood and a key pathway to economic empowerment. Climate-induced hazards disrupt women’s participation on and off the farm. On-farm impacts include droughts that reduce yields, irregular rainfall that affects flowering, and floods that damage coffee plants and wash away fertile soil. These shocks directly lower production and income, especially for women who rely on seasonal coffee earnings to meet basic household needs. Off-farm disruptions include floods and landslides that damage or destroy rural roads, cutting off access to collection centres, processing facilities, and local markets. When roads become impassable, the harvested coffee cannot be transported on time, leading to quality losses, rejected produce, or distress sales at lower prices.
When coffee income declines, most women living in the rural provinces often absorb the shock by cutting food consumption or withdrawing children from school. These coping strategies undermine long-term economic security and limit their ability to invest in farm improvements or climate-resilient practices. Insurance products that cover multiple risks, particularly in the coffee value chain, can strengthen their resilience to disasters.
Coffee farmers have a very small window for harvesting the coffee so that it is of the highest quality. During a climate disaster the location of the coffee products may be unaffected, but the roads and bridges leading to it may be obstructed resulting in the loss of product because farmers couldn’t harvest the coffee on time. This loss is usually not covered by insurance which oftentimes only covers the direct effects of climate disasters on the coffee.
Care responsibilities constrain rural women’s economic activities after climate disasters, further restricting their asset accumulation to draw on for rebuilding their lives.
Women become the main family caretakers after a climate disaster. For example, after a community school was recently lost due to a climate disaster, many women entrepreneurs spoke of having to transport their children to schools farther away, which prevented them from continuing their businesses. The women expressed the need for an insurance product that covers lost earnings after disasters.
CRI needs to be affordable or provide premium subsidies for low-income women; otherwise, they will continue using negative financial coping mechanisms.
Even if an insurance product exists to address rural women’s needs, such as providing payouts to compensate for lost agricultural products or earnings, it needs to be low-cost to be affordable. If the price is not right, women will continue to rely on high-interest emergency loans, deplete their existing savings, or reallocate budgets away from essential needs such as healthcare and education.
For us as small-scale farmers, it‘s very difficult to acquire insurance. Insurance of this type is expensive in Costa Rica, and government programs don‘t reach all regions, as they are only for select groups. We need help to pay the cost; I‘m not saying it should be free, but we need help in some form, and all the initiatives should prioritize women heads of household.
On the supply side, insights highlight emerging interest and support needs for developing an inclusive women-targeted CRI market in Costa Rica.
Innovative insurance product ideas to meet the needs of the rural women’s market exist, but insurers require handholding support to translate these ideas into reality.
Insurers acknowledge the business case and see the advantages of integrating gender considerations into CRI and of addressing women-specific and intersectional risks facing indigenous women. The training workshop discussions generated innovative ideas for developing new products to address the needs of women, including a flood product for the Huetar Norte region targeting women working in microenterprises and a parametric flood insurance product targeting women coffee producer, coupled with financial education. Notably, there was a recognised need to improve CRI literacy to complement product availability and stimulate market uptake. However, there is demand for more support on how to further develop and pilot such products among the rural women’s market, leveraging on experience from other markets.
Data availability and analysis constraints need to be overcome to facilitate customer-centric approaches to inclusive CRI market development.
Currently, there is a lack of data about the vulnerability conditions and needs of low-income rural women for the insurers to derive demand-side insights. There is also a need among insurers to know what data is helpful to collect, such as disaggregated data on willingness to pay for insurance. In addition, there are challenges in the insurance sector about how to analyse the level of social inclusion in their existing customer portfolios. This indicates a need for further insurer capacity building in analysing sex-disaggregated customer data to generate insights that support product development for different segments of the women’s market.
Building an inclusive CRI market requires the insurance supervisor to lead by example.
While the insurance industry has made progress in including women in its workforce and customer base, challenges and gaps remain. For example, the leadership of both the sector and the insurance regulator is still dominated by men. There are opportunities for the regulator to strengthen awareness within its staff and the broader sector of the business and the regulatory value of gender diversity, while also supporting the growth of the women’s insurance market. Given that sex-disaggregated insurance data is collected for the financial sector, SUGESE has opportunities to build further capacity in its entities to use this data. Furthermore, there are concrete actions that it can take through its regulatory mandate to stimulate low-cost parametric CRI and promote consumer literacy on CRI, drawing on examples within and beyond the Latin American region.
The leadership of the insurance sector and regulator is still dominated by men, and the participation of women is related to more operative tasks. Despite progress, there are clear barriers that show we still have a long way to go for gender equality in the sector. For me, the main barrier is education.
The insights gained from the capacity building sessions provide a foundation for the next steps in implementing Costa Rica’s policy priorities to build the resilience of vulnerable women and their families. By engaging with insurers and incorporating input from rural women in Costa Rica, the two awareness sessions have created a bridge between vulnerable communities and insurers to foster inclusive CDRFI solutions. It has also highlighted the need for more technical support to stimulate the market development of innovative solutions that address the needs of the most vulnerable communities to climate disasters in the country.
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