ACRE Africa, a licensed microinsurance intermediary operating across Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, has partnered with German decentralized insurance startup Etherisc to roll out a blockchain-based crop insurance product called BIMA PIMA (Swahili for "insurance in small installments"). The program deploys parametric weather-indexed policies through smart contracts, meaning payouts are triggered automatically by pre-agreed weather thresholds rather than assessed claims, with disbursements routed via M-Pesa directly to farmers' mobile phones. By April 2022, the program had onboarded approximately 22,000 Kenyan smallholder farmers.

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The Problem It Solves

Fewer than 3% of an estimated 48 million smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa carry any form of crop insurance, according to data from the Ethereum Foundation blog and Ledger Insights.

The reasons are structural. Traditional insurance requires physical farm inspections for claims processing, which pushes payout cycles to between 30 and 45 days, sometimes stretching to a full growing season. For farmers earning roughly $1.40 per person per day from one acre of mixed subsistence and cash crops, that delay is not an inconvenience. It means taking on debt or skipping the next planting cycle entirely. Premium costs and a general distrust of insurers further suppress uptake.

Benson Njuguna, a Business Transformation Specialist at ACRE Africa, embedded with the project as part of the Ethereum Foundation's inaugural Next Billion Fellowship in 2021, a program designed to place blockchain practitioners within emerging-economy organizations to develop real-world applications. "Farmers distrust insurers," Njuguna said. "The blockchain solution provides an immutable, transparent ledger where every transaction can be verified."

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How the System Works

The technical architecture is built to reach users without smartphones or crypto wallets. Farmers receive scratch cards embedded in seed packaging. Activating the card by SMS or USSD (a feature-phone-compatible protocol widely used in Kenya for transactions without internet connectivity) registers them to a smart contract policy on Gnosis Chain (formerly xDai), an Ethereum-compatible network chosen for its near-zero transaction fees.

Sub-cent transaction costs on Gnosis Chain make it economically viable to issue policies priced as low as $0.50, something that would be impossible on Ethereum's main network given its higher gas fees.

Chainlink oracles (a decentralized oracle network that feeds real-world data into blockchain contracts) pull weather data from external sources and match it against three crop growth phases: germination, vegetation, and flowering. Because the oracle network is decentralized rather than reliant on a single data source, no single party can manipulate the weather readings that trigger payouts, a property that directly reinforces farmer trust in the system.

When a qualifying weather event is recorded, the smart contract executes automatically and routes a payout to the farmer's M-Pesa account. During Kenya's Long Rains season in 2021, 511 farmers received mid-season payouts and another 4,021 received end-of-season payouts, with total disbursements reaching approximately $3,436. That figure covers a single season of a geographically limited pilot encompassing a fraction of enrolled farmers and does not represent the program's full portfolio.

Payout cycles dropped from a range of 30 to 45 days down to under 24 hours, a reduction of roughly 97%, according to ACRE Africa and Mercy Corps Ventures. Policy issuance costs fell by up to 41% compared to traditional insurance, and premiums came in up to 30% lower, according to figures from Ledger Insights and the Climate Finance Lab.

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Token Mechanics and On-Chain Context

Etherisc's native governance token, DIP, allows holders to stake into risk pools as collateral that backs insurance payouts. As of late 2025, DIP had a circulating supply of approximately 239.7 million tokens against a maximum supply of one billion, with a market price near $0.0032 per token.

The project received grant funding from a Chainlink Community Grant, the Ethereum Foundation, and the Decentralized Insurance Foundation. Etherisc's Generic Insurance Framework is open-source, meaning developers elsewhere can adapt the policy logic for other agricultural or climate contexts.

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Regional Significance Beyond Kenya

The design principles here matter for markets well outside East Africa. M-Pesa, the mobile money platform underlying the program's payout infrastructure, serves more than 90% of Kenyan households and counts over 60 million users across East and Central Africa. That penetration is what makes the model viable at this scale. The combination of a low-cost EVM-compatible chain, Chainlink oracle feeds, SMS and USSD-based enrollment, and mobile money disbursement creates a replicable stack for any region where smartphone penetration is low but mobile payment infrastructure exists.

The Climate Finance Lab projects potential expansion into Uganda, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mali, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Thailand, among other markets. The organization also projects a long-term target of reaching 1.2 million farmers in Kenya alone, with $6 to $10 billion in annual premium mobilization projected at full scale.

One known limitation is basis risk. Weather station coverage in Sub-Saharan Africa sits at roughly one eighth of the minimum density recommended by the World Meteorological Organization. Sparse sensor networks mean a qualifying climate event may not always register accurately, leaving some affected farmers without a triggered payout. Satellite data and expanded oracle integrations are the stated approach to closing that gap.

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What Comes Next

ACRE Africa has committed to migrating all its parametric insurance products onto blockchain infrastructure, including rainfall and soil moisture products, based on outcomes from the pilot. The program represents one of the more concrete applications of Ethereum-adjacent infrastructure to financial inclusion in Africa, with verifiable on-chain transaction records and measurable outcomes at the farm level. Current coverage figures are likely higher than 2022 reported numbers, and ACRE Africa would be the primary source for updated enrollment data.