As climate variability intensifies, smallholder households—especially women within those
households—face growing exposure to weather-related shocks, increasing their vulnerability to
uncompensated losses and consumption shortfalls. Index insurance has emerged as a scalable
risk management tool, yet basis risk, i.e., the gap between farm-level losses and index-triggered
payouts, undermines trust, limits insurance demand, and constrains impacts on well-being
especially among women. To understand the gendered impacts of reducing basis risk, we ask
whether uncompensated shocks resulting from basis risk might affect women more than men,
by analyzing gender differences in coping with shocks. Female farmers have lower education
levels, less land, lower food consumption scores, and less agency in decisions over household
coping responses than male farmers. Shocks—especially damage to standing crops and illnesses
within the household—are associated with a greater reduction in food consumption scores
among women than among men. These descriptive patterns suggest that basis risk has more
severe implications for women than men, offering an explanation for why lowering basis risk
improves insurance demand and perceptions particularly among women farmers.
