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The World Bank Spring Meetings wrapped up last month with a renewed focus on building a green, resilient, and inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Addressing the challenges of climate, debt, and inequality is key to an impactful and lasting global recovery.

The Global Risk Financing Facility (GRiF) is supporting this effort by enabling earlier and more reliable response and recovery to climate and disaster shocks. Since its inception just over two years ago, the facility has expanded its focus in part by applying risk financing to risks beyond natural hazards. Thus, GRiF has been able to not only respond to the pandemic directly, but also to the many compound crises that have resulted from it.

With a hopeful eye toward the future, GRiF continues to strive for new opportunities to achieve an inclusive recovery.  

VIRTUAL HIGHLIGHTS
GRiF Technical Talks - Virtual Speaker Series
The Global Risk Financing Facility is launching the GRiF Technical Talks, a virtual speaker series, which will undertake technical conversations with project teams and share lessons learned with the broader Disaster Risk Finance community.  

These operationally focused discussions, featuring webinars and podcasts, will enable a shared understanding of GRiF projects across stakeholders.  

The first event will be held on May 27th at 8am EST and will feature an overview of GRiF followed by a conversation with our founding donors. Subsequent talks will focus on country projects.

To register for the May Technical Talk, please click here. To access the May Technical Talk Fact Sheet, please click here.

Blog Post: Financial Resilience Around the World
Shocks--no matter their cause--are inevitable. We all know that. Through the Global Risk Financing Facility (GRiF), we strive to help vulnerable countries prepare financially for those shocks. So, they can resist, rebound, and recover from their financial impacts.

We've learned a lot in the two years since GRiF went from design to implementation. Our first publiannual report shows the importance and the value of our work. We see five key takeaways from our early experience: 

1) GRiF's work is relevant across borders; 2) We can apply what we know across sectors; 3) We can adapt risk financing principles to address different risks in different contexts; 4) Developing flexible shock-agnostic financing and systems helps quick recovery; and 5) Financial instruments work better when they're embedded and linked to delivery systems. 

Read the full blog post here

Annual Report 2020
The year 2020 witnessed GRiF's portfolio expansion to new countries and new sectors. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, GRiF responded by restructuring its pipeline to provide additional short- and medium-term grants to help countries prepare for potential compound shocks. 

This Annual Report documents activities from July 2019 until June 2020, showing how GRiF supported financial planning in an uncertain world. 

Read the full report here

InsuResilience High Level Consultative Group Meeting
The InsuResilience Global Partnership is the primary networking and knowledge-sharing platform for the climate and disaster risk finance and insurance community. GRiF is a member of the partnership’s Program Alliance, a collaborative platform that facilitates information exchange on risk financing services such as risk analytics, technical assistance, and solution design.

The InsuResilience Global Partnership is governed by the High-Level Consultative Group, where the World Bank participates as a member. The fourth High Level Consultative Group meeting will take place on June 1 and will discuss affordability and sustainability of climate and disaster risk financing solutions, as well as review collective progress on Vision 2025.

To learn more about InsuResilience, click here

PROJECTS IN FOCUS: INDONESIA & AFGHANISTAN
Strengthening Fiscal Resilience in Indonesia
A new GRiF project is strengthening Indonesia’s financial and fiscal resilience to natural disasters and health-related shocks. From 2014 to 2018, Indonesia’s central government spent between $90 million and $500 million annually on disaster response and recovery. To help manage these costs, GRiF co-financed the $500 million World Bank Indonesia Disaster Risk Finance & Insurance project to support the establishment of a Pooling Fund for Disasters as the central mechanism for post-disaster financing. This Pooling Fund will eventually leverage domestic and international insurance markets that would offer protection to the Pooling Fund from events of higher magnitudes.
 
A grant of $14 million supports operational start up and systems building for the Pooling Fund. Resources have also been allocated to bring in best practice and technical expertise to strengthen environmental and social management systems, leverage new technology and risk transfer for the Pooling Fund, and invest in evaluations and learning, including how to best serve the most vulnerable.

Read the press release here, and the project information here.
Supporting Shock Response in Afghanistan 
Like many partner countries, Afghanistan usually responds to shocks with donor financing implemented by humanitarian agencies. As a result, investment in building government response capabilities, sustainable national systems, and long-term resilience has been limited, and support to shock-affected households is often delayed and not sufficient. 
 
To help the Government of Afghanistan transition toward a more sustainable approach, last year GRiF awarded a $25 million grant, its largest to date. The grant will support the design and set-up of a shock-responsive mechanism within its social protection system, and co-finance for premium payments for a risk transfer solution, which will be developed in time. This is being set up under a corresponding $200 million World Bank operation.

Read the project information here.
RELATED NEWS
GlobalRiskFinancing.org GlobalRiskFinancing.org
Related: Financial Protection Forum | Fundamentals of DRF E-learning | GFDRR 
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