NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

In March Jamii, a local start-up offering micro-health insurance services, announced ambitious plans to expand into East and Central Africa this year.

Launched in January 2015, Jamii is a mobile policy-management platform that performs the administrative activities of an insurer, while also providing access to low-cost insurance policies ordered on mobile phones using “quick codes” (formally known as unstructured supplementary service data, or USSD, codes).

Partnerships with Jubilee Insurance and Vodacom Tanzania have enabled Jamii to implement a cashless premiums-collection system at more than 400 hospitals. This has helped it reduce insurance administration costs by up to 95% and allowed it to offer microinsurance policies for as low as $1 per month. Since it set up the platform a little over two years ago, almost 8000 Tanzanians have signed up.

Having won Tanzania’s portion of Seedstars World, an emerging markets start-up competition, in September, the firm recently closed a $750,000 round of seed funding, split equally between grants and venture capital. This came on the back of a $250,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the firm will pitch for another $1m in investment in Switzerland in April.