Microinsurance

Because you are working amid a lot of situations with crises, with blood, with tears, with enormous challenges. Amid that environment, how do you create a situation where your team feels encouraged to keep innovating?

That, you know, now I am frankly fortunate and blessed, sometimes I think I'm cursed as well, to lead an organization that has innovation in its DNA. We started with, you know, giving out loans to individuals in the 1970s, early 70s, started trust groups about the same time that Professor Yunus is starting there in Bangladesh. Didn't stop there. Say, okay, well, now that these people have loans, let's figure out how to give them savings accounts or there aren't any banks that open savings accounts for poor women. Let's go and open a bank. I mean, what's gonna stop us, right? No, that's not enough. They don't have insurance. So let's set up the world's first micro insurance agency. We started the first micro insurance agency on the planet, grew it to about six million policies. Right.

And what is micro insurance? Can you define that?

Microinsurance is where an individual who is living on three dollars, 50 cents a day, who no insurance company would ever look at. Right. We issue them an insurance policy to insure them against accidents, against dismemberment, things like that, against, you know, if they end up losing the means that they have of earning a living. There is a drought. There is a flood, you know. So they have insurance to tide over. It's basically emergency insurance. So when that part of our business got about six to seven million policies. So we are not an insurance agency. We happen to be running now the biggest portfolio of tiny insurance policies. Let's sell it to an insurance company. They know how to grow this business. We don't. So we got to hold of and looked around and found a French insurer, AXA. You know, they took over our business. We sold it to them. Within about five years, they had gone from six million policies to over 60 million. Now there's over 100 million. So we would never have got there by ourselves. Never. Right. So what did we do? We got the money. And we said, all right, next. Now let's go invest in figuring out how to get education for children. All right. So now we're at a point where we have six and a half thousand schools, four million children. Now we think we can take it to double or triple. So that's I think that their ability to, frankly, one, find the solutions, not stop till you find how to get them to work, but then stop when they're working to say now who's the best to execute? And that's the hardest thing to do, is to actually let go of your successes and then start over.