Awareness on life cover

Business

ABOUT two per cent of the country’s population have some form of life insurance, according to BSP Life PNG Ltd country manager Nilson Singh.
Singh said there were a lot of factors contributing to this.
He made the statement yesterday during a cheque presentation of K10,000 by BSP towards the nationwide insurance campaign facilitated by Centre for Excellence in Financial Inclusion (Cefi) – the first of such campaign in the country.
One was because there was no large scale awareness in the market.
“Based on statistics, only two per cent of the population have some form of insurance, which is quite intriguing,” Singh said.
“There is a lot of factors to that.
“But one of the factors we think is because there is not a large scale awareness in the market, and that’s the reason with this type of awareness. We think that a lot more people will understand what insurance is and effectively buy into some insurance programmes.”
Cefi, PNG Insurance Council, Bank of PNG, Office of the Insurance Commissioner and other insurance industry partners through this two-month campaign, would focus on educating more Papua New Guineans on the different types of insurance products available in PNG, and the processes of acquiring these insurance policies.
Cefi executive director Saliya Ranasinghe said Cefi had developed a financial inclusion strategy.
“In that strategy, inclusive insurance is identified as a priority area,” he said.
“Why we identified that is because we feel that insurance is a very important safety net for the growth of the people.
“The penetration of insurance is very, very small – even compared to other countries in the region itself.
“Therefore, we have decided that we will go on a public campaign which will last for two months which will be mainly through social media and there will be other things that will be happening on other main media platforms as well.
“Cefi expects that insurance penetration will grow and the public awareness of insurance will expand after this event.”