Key Highlights
- Ripple, Women’s World Banking, and Pula have launched a pilot targeting approximately 3,000 smallholder farmers in Uganda’s refugee and host communities, with a focus on women.
- The initiative, titled Harnessing Technology for Women’s Financial Resilience in Uganda, combines Pula’s parametric insurance with Ripple’s settlement infrastructure.
- Insurance payouts are triggered automatically when predefined events, such as drought, crop loss, or health emergencies, occur, removing the need for beneficiaries to file manual claims.
Ripple, a blockchain-based financial technology firm; Women’s World Banking, a nonprofit organization; and Pula, an agricultural insurance technology (insurtech) company, have launched a pilot project to deliver parametric insurance to approximately 3,000 smallholder farmers in Uganda’s refugee and host communities, with a focus on women.
In an announcement published September 29, the initiative is titled Harnessing Technology for Women’s Financial Resilience in Uganda. The pilot combines parametric insurance design from Pula with settlement technology from Ripple.
When a predefined shock occurs, such as drought, crop loss, or a health emergency, payouts are triggered automatically. Beneficiaries receive funds in Ugandan shillings through mobile money without filing claims or waiting for manual approval.
RLUSD serves as the backend settlement layer. The settlement process operates in the background, while deposits and withdrawals continue in local currency. Farmers interact only with the mobile-money channel they already use.
Women’s World Banking is partnering with Pula to design and deliver the insurance product and is coordinating with humanitarian actors on the ground. The approach combines parametric insurance with automated settlement.
Pilot objectives and measurement
The project has three stated objectives. First, it aims to deliver predictable, shock-responsive support covering agricultural, health and life risks to women farmers who currently lack access to insurance.
Second, it seeks to demonstrate that automated, technology-enabled settlement reduces payout times and secures payments in humanitarian and financial service delivery. Third, it intends to generate evidence and learnings that could support expansion from pilot to broader scale across humanitarian and financial systems.
Impact will be assessed using the Women Economic Empowerment (WEE) Barometer developed by Women’s World Banking. The tool will track changes in participants’ ability to manage shocks, their confidence in financial decision-making and their control over household resources.
Context on target communities
Uganda’s agriculture sector relies largely on rain-fed production carried out by smallholder farmers. Women farmers in refugee and host communities face exposure to climate shocks, health events and income disruption. Between 2018 and 2020, climate disasters displaced an estimated 334,000 people in Uganda, according to figures cited in the announcement.
Women’s World Banking research states that more than 800 million women globally lack access to financial tools needed to receive relief payments during emergencies; in Sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 300 million women lack a mechanism to receive emergency relief payments after a climate disaster.
The pilot is designed to test whether the combination of parametric coverage and automated settlement improves measurable financial resilience for the targeted group of women smallholder farmers.
RLUSD market background
Separately, Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin crossed the $2 billion market-capitalization mark in late August 2026. Data from Ripple and RWA.xyz showed a total value of approximately $2.02 billion as of August 25, with nearly half of the circulating supply, about $962.9 million, issued on the XRP Ledger and roughly $1.1 billion on Ethereum.
In related technical development, the RLUSD team has been building and testing a feature known as Permission Delegation on the XRPL Devnet. The feature, which was under validator voting on the XRP Ledger in August, allows an account holder to assign specific, limited functions to other accounts while the primary account’s keys remain in cold storage.
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