Introduction
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Bangladesh's agriculture sector supports the livelihoods of millions of smallholder crop farmers, livestock keepers, fish farmers, and coastal fishing communities. However, it remains deeply exposed to climate shocks, disease outbreaks, and extreme weather events. Despite this vulnerability, access to formal agricultural insurance remains negligible, leaving farmers with few tools to recover from losses and limiting the sector's long-term resilience. Past projects in microinsurance in Bangladesh proved to be unsustainable due to a lack of co-development, improper demand estimation, and disconnect between project partners and government counterparts.
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The UNDP Financial Resilience in Agriculture (FRA) Initiative under the Insurance and Risk Finance Facility (IRFF) is working to change this. Operating across 29 countries, FRA supports governments and market players in building inclusive, sustainable agricultural insurance systems that move beyond donor-funded pilots toward institutionalized, government-led programs. In Bangladesh, FRA is being implemented in partnership with the Department of Livestock Services (DLS), the Department of Fisheries (DoF), and the Local Government Division (LGD), with technical support from Innovision Consulting Private Limited, Weather Risk Management Services (WRMS), and Wageningen University. This project is being implemented through a Hackathon process led by government agencies with UNDP, technical partners, insurers, aggregators, MFIs/NGOs, banks, etc. The hackathon process brings together all these stakeholders into three focused workshops to (i) (i) specify the demand, (ii) co-develop insurance value chains, and (iii) reflect, assess and change. The first hackathon has taken place with respective government agencies, UNDP and technical partners to specify the demand packages that are feasible for agriculture insurance.

In the next step of the hackathon process, insurance companies, InsurTechs, AgriTechs, reinsurers, MFI’s, NGOs, banks, etc., are invited to submit an Expression of Interest (EoI) to join the FRA initiative to co-develop agriculture insurance value chains targeting the following priority problem statements: livestock risk protection, aquaculture and mariculture risk, marine asset protection, and crop risk protection.

Evaluation and Selection

EoIs will be evaluated based on the following criteria:
- Technical Capability (25%): Showcasing technical capability in product design, data use, risk modelling, claims mechanisms, and implementation feasibility.
- Past Experience (20%): Past projects or products in agriculture insurance either independently or with donor programs.
- Operational Capability (20%): Capability showing manpower or existing partnerships that are being leveraged for distribution Consortium Strength & Delivery Capability (15%): Consortium strength, expertise, institutional capacity, and ability to deliver results.
- Motivation and Rationale (20%): Rationale to be selected based on organisation/consortia goals and FRA goals alignment.

Up to 5 insurers or consortia will be shortlisted following this EoI, with the strongest 3 solutions from Hackathon Workshop 2 awarded contracts to proceed to pilot.

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Instructions for Applicants

Complete all sections below. Responses must be in English. Where word limits are specified, stay within them. Reviewers will not read beyond the stated limit. All fields are mandatory unless marked optional. A consortium must nominate one Lead Applicant who submits on behalf of all partners.

Submission deadline: 16 July 2026
Queries: tahmeed.rifa@innovision-bd.com
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