First up in GAIP's new series of interviews, we have Chief Executive Officer, Conor Donaldson, who tells us more about GAIP and how GAIP contributes to closing protection gaps.
My name is Conor Donaldson and I am the CEO of the Global Asia Insurance Partnership or GAIP for short.
What is G-A-I-P?
The Global Asia Insurance Partnership or G-A-I-P is a unique platform for the insurance industry, supervisors and academia. Our mission is to create a more resilient future for Asia through catalysing action on new, emerging and accelerating risks and supporting development needs of the sector.
What is a protection gap and why are they important?
Creating a more resilient future for Asia means narrowing protection gaps in Asia.
There are different ways to describe protection gaps – but essentially when we talk about protection gaps we are talking about the difference between total possible losses and insured losses. We narrow protection gaps through reducing risk, increasing access to insurance and strengthening risk finance and risk transfer.
Against a backdrop of continued transformative economic growth, low insurance penetration rates in many Asian countries and an increasingly volatile risk environment, these protection gaps are only growing. While protection gaps are measured in the billions – we need to remember that we are actually talking about individuals, families, businesses and communities who are unprotected. These means that in the event of an adverse event, individuals and families could fall into poverty, business could fail and communities may not be able to recover.
To ensure the continued economic growth and stability in Asia, we must act now on protection gaps.
How is GAIP contributing to closing this protection gap?
Given our mission to create a more resilient future, it is fitting that the first paper GAIP is publishing looks at protection gaps. This paper tries to build off the extensive work done by the insurance sector to quantify protection gaps and orients us towards how we can support the multi-stakeholder dialogue needed for addressing protection gaps. One of the ideas I am most excited about is the paper's recommendation that countries should develop comprehensive protection gap strategies. Such strategies could ensure the necessary steps to close protection gaps are undertaken in a coordinated and comprehensive way.
Beyond this, our work is built around three areas:
- A research arm
- A policy engagement arm
- A talent development arm
These 3 areas strongly support each step of the way in narrowing protection gaps in Asia.
Our research arm, which we call our Living Lab pillar, enables deeper understanding of the risks we face and hence the understanding and quantification of the protection gaps.
Our policy engagement and talent development arms, supports the development of the right enabling environment for addressing protection gaps, through the promotion of thought-leadership and research-driven, action-oriented dialogues across our tripartite partners of the insurance industry, supervisors and academia, as well as supporting the development of the future pipeline of insurance talents across all levels and across the private and public sectors.
Last but not least, our research and policy engagement arms will also support the final step towards narrowing of protection gaps – the design and implementation of sustainable solutions.
