Contingent Lines of Credit: Helping Financial Institutions Stay with Clients Through Climate Shocks
Webinar
Low-income households are facing increasing losses from floods, droughts, and other climate shocks that disrupt income, destroy assets, drive underinvestment, and force harmful coping strategies like distress sales or reduced consumption. These same shocks can ripple through the financial system, affecting financial service providers (FSPs) as well, showing up as portfolio stress and rising defaults. This often forces FSPs to scale back lending just when their clients need support the most, which creates reputational risk.
As climate shocks grow more frequent and severe, financial service providers need tools that go beyond portfolio protection. Contingent Lines of Credit (CLOCs) pre-arrange loan terms and eligibility in calm times, and release funds rapidly to enable coping when a shock occurs, giving retail clients a dignified way to recover and FSPs a structured way to protect portfolios.
This webinar is designed to provide practitioners across the inclusive finance and climate resilience ecosystem, including FSPs, investors, DFIs, donors, foundations and ecosystem support organizations, with a better understanding of what CLOCs are, how they work, and their potential to support inclusive FSPs in bolstering their own climate resilience, and that of their clients.
Featuring a panel of experts, the session will share practical experience from institutions that have designed, tested, and operated CLOCs in real agricultural contexts, giving attendees enough grounding to assess whether the tool is relevant for their own clients and markets.
Speakers
Mohammad Saidul Haque is Assistant General Manager and Head of the Microinsurance Unit at BRAC Microfinance in Bangladesh, where he leads insurance product innovation and operations with a focus on strengthening climate resilience for low-income households. He has served as BRAC's lead partner on the Resilience+ Innovation Facility, overseeing the deployment of an integrated suite of contingent lines of credit, index insurance, and savings products for smallholder farmers, all operating off a shared area yield index. With 13 years of progressive leadership experience at BRAC across Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, and beyond, Saidul brings deep operational expertise in microfinance, microinsurance, and large-scale program management.
Michael R. Carter is a Distinguished Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis and director of the Resilience+ Innovation Facility, a five-year Gates Foundation-funded initiative developing risk management solutions for smallholder farmers in partnership with BFA Global. An elected fellow of NBER, BREAD, and the American Agricultural Economics Association, Carter's research focuses on poverty dynamics, index insurance, and deepening financial markets for smallholder farmers. He also directs the BASIS MRR Innovation Lab and serves as honorary professor of economics at the University of Cape Town.
Diana Boncheva Gooley is Head of Operations and Growth at Atram, an AI-powered platform that helps financial service providers protect small business customers from climate shocks by combining early flood warning systems with access to emergency liquidity, enabling clients to take protective action before a shock hits and access recovery funds afterward. With over 15 years building partnerships and programs across emerging markets, she is a recognized leader in financial inclusion and digital innovation, having previously led USAID's Women in the Digital Economy Initiative and built financial inclusion partnerships across Africa, Asia, and Latin America at Women's World Banking.
Peter Zetterli is CGAP’s Green Lead, spearheading the organization’s work on the intersection of financial inclusion and environmental concerns. This critical body of work focuses on using inclusive finance to support sustainability by developing more environmentally relevant solutions for underserved clients and the financial institutions that serve them. As extreme weather and natural disasters increase the risks and costs of serving people living in poverty, CGAP's aim is to ensure that progress on financial inclusion isn't lost. Additionally, we seek to make global sustainability finance more inclusive and accessible, empowering vulnerable communities to develop their own strategies for how to respond and build resilience.
Peter previously led CGAP’s work on the future of financial services, including focused on understanding what new business models are emerging thanks to technology innovation and how to harness it for broader and better financial access. He and his team has published extensively on the transformative potential of fintech, platforms, and digital banking models as well as the unbundling and embedding of financial services at cgap.org/fintech.
Before that, Peter managed CGAP’s work on inclusive payment ecosystems in Africa, where he lived for a decade. This included working with regulators to create enabling environments and with providers to find commercially viable business models that meet the needs of the poor. He had a particular focus on mobile money regulation, rural agent networks, and merchant payments, around which Peter created a digital handbook with practical guidance for providers.
Before joining CGAP, Peter spent seven years with the United Nations promoting financial inclusion and private sector development in Sierra Leone and China, where he managed the UNDP microfinance program and tried to jumpstart Chinese mobile financial services through a high-level partnership with Ericsson as early as 2008.
Peter has Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Development Economics from Lund University in Sweden. He speaks four languages, including French and Mandarin.
Moderator
Jacob Winiecki is a Senior Consulting Associate and Program Director at BFA Global, where he leads climate adaptation and resilience programs across emerging markets. He serves as project lead for the Resilience+ Innovation Facility, overseeing the design and implementation of index-linked insurance, credit, and savings solutions for smallholder farmers in Bangladesh and Nepal, including contingent lines of credit. He is a contributing author to CGAP's recently published Contingent Lines of Credit (CLOC): A Liquidity Tool for Customer Climate Resilience and brings over 20 years of experience at the intersection of climate, fintech, and financial inclusion.