Understanding Customers in Environments of Severe Climate-Related Weather Events

It is fundamental for financial service providers to understand how low-income households in climate-stricken regions use financial services to prepare and recover from climate-led severe weather events. These results are from a consumer study sponsored by CGAP in Nigeria and Bangladesh aimed at providing firsthand information about how vulnerable people build and lose resilience, as well as a close view of how they gather and spend funds to cope with a climate crisis.

In Nigeria, drought and severe rains are becoming unpredictable, and dealing with both are steadily depleting farmers' resilience for the next severe weather event.  In Bangladesh, the occurrence of cyclones is increasingly frequent and becoming unpredictable. These are also causing resilience depletion, as there is no time for households to recover their wealth before being stricken by another climate event.

In this work, the authors take a deep dive into example of specific events to gather fine-grained evidence about what actions affected households take during these events, what financial services they use to fund those actions and what financial services they wish they had to cope with these events. This study was conducted using two different research methods in each country. There are four separate decks: qualitative and quantitative findings from Nigeria, and qualitative and quantitative findings from Bangladesh.