This study calibrates an index based insurance in order to address two major research questions that remain unresolved. First, how much can agricultural intensification improve insurance outcomes; second, how does its impact on plot level production depends on the level of subsidization of the pooling institution’s loading factor covering the risk taken. Cross-validation will be used for the insurance parameters’ optimization in order to address the risk of over-fitting, which leads to an overestimation of insurance impacts. Agriculture in West African countries is mainly rain-fed. Due to inadequate amount and poor temporal distribution of rainfall during the cropping season, droughts occur frequently in the region causing significant reduction in crop production. Index based insurance has potential to increase farmers capacity to take risk and improve average yield, by limiting weather risk impacts on on-farm income.
