Enterprise Risk Management: a National Risk Management & Insurance Strategy for Sierra Leone
Risk management has been defined as the procedure of identifying and analyzing loss exposures, evaluating the feasibility of danger management methods to address the loss exposures, picking and implementing the best tactics and monitoring results, in such a manner that any organization or governmental entity can meet its objectives—minimization of the adverse effects of accidental losses.
It is certainly a truism that the insurance business can play a very important and essential role in a nation’s developmental approach. In most created and developing nations, insurance and risk management measures and practices have and carry on to offer the bedrock for a sustained modern socio-economic infrastructure in which development and economic growth have flourished.
In the United States of America for instance, risk management and insurance coverage not only permeates every single facet of economic and social endeavor, ranging from healthcare to governmental contracting, but is the crucial engine driving innovation, development, commerce, investments, governance and societal adjust.
In the Sierra Leonean predicament by contrast, the challenge nonetheless remains how insurance professionals and governmental policymakers can creatively utilize enterprise threat management principles and insurance strategies in both the public and private sectors to effectuate the country’s economic improvement and development.
By means of the utilization of enterprise danger management principles, governmental entities and organizations are offered a systematic rigorous method to managing danger from all sources that threaten their strategic, developmental, socio-economic and economic goals.
As a Sierra Leonean insurance professional who more than the decades with each and every significant loss either accidental or by design in the country often retorted that insurance would indemnify the losses, whether it was the burning by the rebels of machinery for construction of the Bo/Freetown highway or the destruction of the Sierra Rutile Company’s mining infrastructure, culminating in the latest NACSA and SABABU construction contracts the realization that our nation lacks a national risk management and insurance coverage workplace developed to ensure that the country recoups indemnification or is held “harmless” in such occasions is certainly a trigger for alarm.
It is therefore against this backdrop that we are articulating and advocating the improvement and establishment in Sierra Leone of a national insurance and risk management tactic workplace developed to:
Serve as a repository of all governmental contracts and agreements.
Provide technical threat management and insurance coverage evaluation of all past, present and long term governmental contracts and agreements so that government can recoup damages from past and present insurance contracts.
Design and style and introduce innovative new micro insurance coverage merchandise and services.
Work in conjunction with ministers, permanent secretaries and skilled heads of departments in establishing an appropriate and successful risk management method inside their ministries to allow them determine risks, analyze risks and mitigate threat exposures, through loss manage measures.
Provide insurance coverage evaluation of all governmental contracts and agreements for compliance with acceptable terms and conditions.
Offer loss control oversight in all ministries, departments and governmental agencies.
Protect government owned assets and reduce loss to the government and men and women.
It is also aimed at initiating and adding a new viewpoint to the wider debate of how a national insurance and risk management tactic could be utilized in addressing both macro and micro dangers and loss exposures inherent in all facets and sectors of the nation’s socio-economic and governance infrastructure.
For an administration composed of insurance specialists in quite important strategic positions such as the President, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Employment and Social Security and Minister of Trade and Marketplace, the will need for establishment of such a “National Insurance and Risk Management Strategy” ought to be a no brainier and ought to as a matter of urgency be seriously considered in other to effectuate the President’s avowed aim of “running the nation like a business“.
The simple law governing the conduct of Insurance coverage in Sierra Leone is the Insurance Act, 2000 which established the Sierra Leone Insurance coverage Commission (SLICOM). Pursuant to section 3(1) of the Act, the commission is charged with ensuring “effective administration, supervision, regulation and monitoring of the enterprise of insurance in Sierra Leone” through the efficiency and exercise of a variety of statutory functions.
Even though the Sierra Leone Insurance coverage Commission (SLICOM) and specially the Commissioner has performed a excellent job above the years in its regulatory and supervisory functions, the broader insurance coverage business has nonetheless lagged in matching the potentials of its contributions towards national development.
The Act nevertheless does not provide for the sort of danger management and insurance coverage oversight envisaged by the establishment of the danger management and insurance coverage workplace.
As a outcome of its inability to innovate and increase its capacity and industry reach beyond traditional instruments targeting only the formal sector, whose clients are corporations and wealthy people, with obligatory goods such as motor insurance, the Sierra Leone insurance market continues failing the nation.
In conclusion, government contracting personnel make daily enterprise decisions about contract risks, insurance, limits, coverage and evaluation of insurance. Delivering them with the proper tools and sources to assist in creating these organization choices is really important for any nation‘s developmental aspirations.
The author, Mr. Kortor Kamara has over 25 years knowledge in the insurance market both in Sierra Leone and the United States. He is a Chartered Property & Casualty Insurer and holds the Employees Compensation Claims Expert (WCCP) designation. He is a Member of the Chartered Insurance Institute ( London) Certified Self-Insurance coverage Claims Administrator-State of California Registered Planet Bank Consultant and has served as a Consultant on a variety of Insurance initiatives in Sierra Leone, including design and style of the country’s 1st Title Insurance Policy.
In addition, Mr. Kamara is a graduate of Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, 1978-1981 studied Law at each the Univerisity of West Los Angeles School of Law and the California Southern School of Law in Riverside. He is at present a Doctoral Candidate in Insurance coverage and Danger Management.
By way of association with Saddleback Re, have been he serves as the Regional Manager, Africa Division, Mr. Kamara is intimately involved in the provision of reinsurance coverage, policy layout, loss manage, coaching and threat management solutions to the African Insurance marketplace.
www.saddlebackre.com.
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