There is a growing body of evidence of divergence between what commercial insurance can offer and what NGOs require.
International NGOs are generally not getting full value from their insurance. Many face growing exclusions, restrictions on where they can operate, and increasing premiums that absorb resources better spent elsewhere.
For national NGOs, the problem is more acute. Their coverage is scant, despite their staff facing the greatest risks.
The problem
These challenges stem from structural misalignments between how commercial insurance operates and how NGOs manage risk.
The NGO sector is a relatively small market for the insurance industry, giving insurers limited commercial incentive to invest in the specialist expertise required to fully understand how NGOs operate in high-risk environments. As a result, NGOs can face higher pricing, narrower cover or exclusions that do not adequately reflect how they understand and manage risk.
The consequences are operational. Increasingly, NGOs are having to decide whether to expose themselves to unsustainable levels of risk or reduce their programmatic ambitions, leaving communities most in need without assistance.
For national NGOs, the consequences also extend beyond duty of care. Pooled funds, a key vehicle for expanding the localisation of humanitarian aid, often require partners to hold insurance. The lack of appropriate cover for national NGOs is becoming a barrier to accessing these funds, limiting the expansion of localisation itself.
The solution
GISF is exploring an NGO-owned insurance platform as a way to address these structural challenges.
The platform would be an independent organisation, owned and governed by its NGO members rather than external shareholders. It would operate on a not-for-profit basis, with any surplus reinvested for members’ benefit rather than distributed as profit.
In the short term, the platform would provide insurance products better suited to INGOs, enabling them to more effectively manage risk and operate where they need to. Specialist underwriting would be built around NGO-specific realities and take account not only of the contexts in which NGOs operate, but of how individual organisations manage risk.
Over time, the platform would build on that foundation to develop tailored insurance products for national NGOs and strengthen risk sharing across the sector: between INGOs and their national partners, between donors and implementing NGOs, and through stronger support structures that help national NGOs participate in pooled funding.
As an NGO-owned platform, it could also retain and reinvest value within the sector, using surplus to support activities that mitigate risks to NGOs where they are operating.
The proposed model is not just ‘better insurance’. It offers the potential to create a genuinely new piece of sector-owned infrastructure that strengthens how NGOs manage and share risk.
The above represents generalised results of GISF’s work. For more detail, please contact jon@gisf.ngo.