Insurance for relief and development workers
Insurance transfers a financial consequence. It does not transfer a risk, and it does not discharge a duty of care. Organisations that treat a policy as the answer to a dangerous posting usually discover the difference after an incident.
What insurance can and cannot do
Insurance can cover the cost of medical treatment, evacuation, repatriation, disability and death. It can pay for legal defence and for compensation. Those are real and necessary things, and an organisation that sends staff into high-risk environments without them has an obvious problem.
Insurance cannot prevent an incident, and it cannot make a decision reasonable. A risk assessment that concludes a deployment is manageable because the organisation holds a policy has not assessed anything. The test applied after an incident is what the organisation did to avoid the harm, not what it had arranged to pay for.
The cover an organisation should be able to describe without looking it up
- Who is insured. International staff, national staff, contractors, consultants, secondees, partners, drivers, guards, visitors, and family members accompanying a member of staff. The groups most often left out are national staff, short-term contractors and locally engaged drivers.
- What is covered. Emergency medical treatment, medical evacuation, repatriation of the ill or injured, repatriation of remains, permanent disability, death in service, and psychological support. Cover for psychological harm is frequently excluded or capped low, and that is the harm most likely to follow a critical incident.
- Where and when. Territorial limits, exclusions for war, terrorism and civil unrest, and whether cover applies while travelling to and from the country as well as during the assignment.
- How it is activated. The name of the assistance company, the number to call, who in the organisation is authorised to call it, and what happens outside office hours.
- What the individual has to pay. Excesses and the circumstances in which the organisation covers them rather than the individual.
The gaps that recur
Four gaps appear repeatedly across the sector. National staff are covered by a local scheme that pays a fraction of what the international policy pays for the same injury. Consultants are assumed to be covered by their own arrangements and are frequently not. Psychological support is excluded or limited to a small number of sessions, which is far below what a serious incident requires. And war and terrorism exclusions remove cover from precisely the environments the insurance was bought for.
The paper's practical advice is to test the policy against a real scenario rather than reading the schedule. Take a specific incident, a member of staff who is seriously injured in a specific place, and work through who pays for what from the moment of the incident to the end of the claim. The gaps show up immediately, and they show up at a point when something can still be done about them.
Insurance and the duty of care
Adequate insurance is one element of the duty of care, and courts and tribunals treat it as evidence of whether the employer took the risk seriously. The converse also holds. An organisation that has identified a risk, deployed anyway, and failed to insure against it has recorded the risk and then ignored it, which is a worse position than never having recorded it.
Related
Practical guidance and research on the security of humanitarian staff, for the organisations that send them.