Ep184 Ekhosuehi Iyahen Secretary General of the IDF: Putting valuable insurance knowledge to good use

Often when we go to a conference a CEO will pop up to give us an
inspiring pep talk about how nothing good in the world happens
without insurance and how our industry is one with a genuinely
useful moral purpose that has a positive effect on everything
that it touches. We may nod along and then think little more of
it. But today’s guest is living proof that those CEOs are right
to feel inspired. That’s because Ekhosuehi Iyahen, Secretary
General at the Insurance Development Forum’s (IDF) job is to
harness the strong purpose of insurance to good effect in some of
the countries in the world that can most benefit from it.
Insurance is a business that brings together a vast array of
different skills from science and engineering to statistics and
finance all to try and prevent bad things from happening and to
fix them when they do. But our skills and experience around
prevention and risk mitigation are often lacking in developing
countries that haven’t yet grown sophisticated financial systems
and that’s where the IDF comes in, acting as a convener between
the insurance industry, the aid community and international
sovereign governments and local authorities on the ground. For
instance how does a developing country know where to site its
critical infrastructure if its country hasn’t been properly
modelled for natural hazards? Ekhosuehi is a really interesting
and intelligent guest. She’s also a very rare example of an
academic of high intellect who has moved from the world of ideas
to one of putting theory in practice on the ground. There are a
lot of misconceptions to dispel – the first of which is the idea
that what the IDF is doing is a form of charity. Nothing could be
further from the truth – from this encounter you’ll learn very
quickly that the IDF’s work is all about developing the vast new
insurance markets of the future – and that these are long-term
profitable commercial opportunities that will give rise to even
bigger opportunities as they take hold. So listen on – if you
have ever felt disillusioned at work and wondered whether what
you do makes a difference, what you are about to hear should put
a spring in your step. NOTES The IDF’s website is here:
https://www.insdevforum.org/ Get in touch via email:
info@insdevforum.org LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/company/insdevforum/ X (formerly Twitter):
@InsDevForum LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/