Nigerian Insurtech Riwe Secures UNDP Funding to Bring Climate Insurance to Farmers
Nigerian insurtech startup Riwe has secured UNDP funding to bring...
Riwe, a climate insurance and financial technology company based in Abuja, has secured funding and a partnership from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), and the Islamic Solidarity Fund for Development (ISFD) to expand affordable insurance and financial services for Nigerian smallholder farmers.
The funding supports the rollout of RAIN (Resilience through Affordable and Inclusive Weather Insurance), a programme designed to connect farmers directly with climate protection, real-time weather information, and access to agricultural finance.
Since launching in 2022, Riwe has served over 15,000 farmers across Nigeria. The company was also selected to participate in the Nigerian Insurers Association (NIA) Innovation Lab, placing it among a small group of companies identified by Nigeria’s insurance industry as shaping the next generation of insurance products in the country.
A key part of Riwe’s approach is a digital identity layer built for farmers with no formal financial history. By capturing farm-level data, climate exposure, and insurance behaviour over time, the company creates a profile for each farmer that powers loan applications and product eligibility decisions, giving farmers a credible, data-backed entry point into the formal financial system.
At the core of Riwe’s model is its role as an intelligence layer for agricultural risk. Farmers generate rich operational data, but the systems needed to transform it into actionable intelligence have historically been absent. Riwe fills that gap, pulling together fragmented field data across satellite imagery, field reports, and community experience centres, and converting it into structured risk profiles, predictive yield and exposure models, and dynamic pricing tools. This creates a feedback loop where every farmer interaction, weather event, and payout outcome sharpens the model, producing de-risked assets that banks, insurers, and governments can act on with confidence. Through embedded underwriting APIs, ...
