By Tendai Makaripe
A car pulled up outside an EcoSure outlet in Rusape in November of 2024, and grieving relatives climbed out with their anger showing before their tears did.
They opened the boot, lifted out a coffin and carried it toward the entrance as voices rose and heads turned.
They shouted accusations as they advanced, a raw mix of pain and fury that stopped customers in their tracks.
Bystanders drifted closer, some filming, while others asked what could drive a family to bring the dead to an insurer’s doorstep.
The answer came quickly in the shouting, with relatives saying the funeral benefit was being blocked because the deceased had missed a US$4 premium payment in the same month he fell ill and died.
EcoSure later acknowledged “administrative delays at our Rusape outlet” and apologised, saying it was reviewing the incident “with a view to addressing any gaps in the premium payments and claims process.”
The claim was eventually paid after public pressure, but the coffin protest did something no marketing campaign can control.
It turned a private tragedy into a national argument about whether Zimbabwe’s microinsurance boom is delivering the one thing that matters when loss strikes, which is a payout that arrives on time, without humiliation, without a costly paper chase, and without rules that feel designed to fail the poor.
In Rusape, the issue was not whether a policy could be bought.
It was whether it could be used.
That difference between enrolment and claimability has become the real test of “inclusive insurance” in Zimbabwe, and it explains why a missed US$4 can ignite a street trial outside a shopfront.
Zimbabwe’s microinsurance model has been built on simplicity at the point of sale, with a basic phone, a short code, a small monthly premium and a confirmation message that makes protection feel instant.
But the Rusape coffin protest showed how quickly that simplicity can collapse into complexity once a family stops being a customer and becomes a claimant.
Insurance analyst Innocent Tinarwo said the industry can end up creating two different realities for the same person, one when money is flowing to the insurer and another when money must flow back to the policyholder.
“It’s one thing to sell a policy, and another for remote, low-income customers to successfully claim benefits when tragedy strikes,” Tinarwo said.
The Insurance and Pensions Commission, the regulator, says the complaints it receives show where the pain sits.
“IPEC’s supervisory and consumer complaints data show that claims-related complaints remain the most dominant category across both the short-term insurance and life assurance sectors,” said Lloyd Gumbo, IPEC’s public relations manager.
The short-term insurance sector report for the third quarter of 2025 shows what that dominance looks like in numbers when people try to get paid and fail to get answers.
IPEC recorded 48 complaints in that quarter, and it lists delays in settlement as the leading cause, accounting for 23 of those complaints, or 48%.
Gumbo said IPEC has pushed insurers to shorten the distance between claim approval and payment because that gap is where trust dies.
The regulator’s microinsurance framework sets a hard expectation that once a claim is authorised it “shall be settled within three (3) working days,” subject to applicable guidelines.
Yet the stories that reach the regulator, community advocates and newsrooms show families still experiencing the opposite, with the closer the product gets to the people the further the claims process drifts away from their daily reality.
That is why Gumbo insists inclusion cannot end at sign-up.
“Insurance inclusion cannot be measured solely at the point of sale,” Gumbo said.
“True inclusion requires that claims submission, assessment, and payment are accessible using channels that are realistic for the target market,” he said.
In the Rusape case, the conflict centred on a missed premium, but the deeper issue was how quickly a low-income household can fall out of cover, and how harshly that fall is felt when the loss is death.
Microinsurance is supposed to recognise irregular incomes, and Zimbabwe’s microinsurance framework explicitly builds in a grace period “to ensure that the policyholder is not unduly disadvantaged by irregular cash flow.”
The same framework adds that when a claim is submitted within the grace period, “the value of the claim may be reduced by the sum of the unpaid premium(s),” which points to a design that treats a missed payment as a deduction rather than total exclusion.
That standard matters because it speaks to the moral centre of microinsurance, and it is exactly the kind of rule ordinary people think they are buying when they hear adverts promising peace of mind for “just a few dollars.”
Whether product terms on the ground consistently reflect that microinsurance logic is now the practical question many families ask whenever they see a low-premium policy marketed as protection.
For many rural households, the first barrier is not even the premium rule.
It is the journey from a village to a claims desk.
Zimbabwe’s mobile connectivity is high, but internet use is not, and that split shapes who can realistically submit documents, follow up on a claim and receive updates without repeated travel.
DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report on Zimbabwe says mobile connections were equivalent to 95% of the population in late 2025, while internet penetration was 38.4%, meaning most people still live outside reliable data-based systems.
Fortune Nyamusa, a Harare-based tech analyst, said the country’s “SIM-card reach” is often mistaken for digital capability in the design of financial services.
“The gap between having a SIM card and having reliable internet is where ‘digital inclusion’ becomes a hidden tax,” Nyamusa said.
“In practice, it means a policy sold by USSD but a claim pursued through WhatsApp scans, email addresses and repeated follow-ups that assume data, devices and a stable signal,” he said.
Agnes Mudekunye from Chikombedzi in Chiredzi District said she learned that difference the hard way after her husband died in March.
“They told me to scan and email or send the death certificate via WhatsApp,” she said.
“I have never even used email and network here is poor to send multiple documents,” she said.
Mudekunye said the claim process turned into a series of trips, costs and anxious waiting that felt out of proportion to the promise she thought she had bought.
“It cost more in bus fares and stress than the payout was even worth,” she said.
Her story is not a rejection of insurance as an idea.
It is an indictment of a process that assumes a village household can perform like an office.
That is why Zimbabwe’s microinsurance framework tries to define what “reasonable” should look like in claims documentation for low-value benefits.
It says underwriters should balance fraud controls with “streamlining processes and requiring minimal documentation,” so the system does not punish the very market it targets.
For a death benefit, the framework says documentation “should be limited to a death certificate” plus identification of the deceased and beneficiary, and it adds that advice from a chief, church leader or group leadership “can serve as a death notice.”
This is the regulator’s attempt to hardwire empathy into paperwork, but families and consumer advocates say they still encounter documentation lists that expand the moment a claim is lodged.
Joyline Matsika, a Harare-based consumer rights advocate, said the most common complaint she hears is not that people refuse to comply, but that the requirements keep shifting after the grief has already started.
“People can accept rules when they are clear and realistic, but what breaks them is moving goalposts and silent waiting,” Matsika said.
“An inclusive product becomes exclusive the moment claiming requires money, transport and tech that the customer never had at sign-up,” she said.
Insurance consultant Richard Gatau said microinsurance only works when the claims process is as light as the premium and as simple as the sales channel.
“In practice, this could mean waiving some paperwork or accepting alternative proofs for small claims to speed up payouts,” Gatau said.
Gatau said the goal is not to remove controls, but to publish a short, stable checklist upfront and then keep it stable, so families are not trapped in repeated trips and repeated scanning demands.
Economist Benedict Marufu said inclusive insurance fails when the customer’s easiest moment is paying and the hardest moment is claiming.
“If a customer signed up via a village agent or a USSD code, they should be able to lodge a claim the same way,” Marufu said.
Marufu said that symmetry can look simple, with an agent-assisted claim lodged locally or a basic message that triggers guided support rather than a self-service document marathon.
That symmetry matters because microinsurance is often sold as dignity, with the promise that a family will not have to beg or borrow to bury their dead.
When the claims process becomes humiliating or expensive, the product stops being dignified and becomes another system that punishes poverty.
Tendai Hove, a policyholder from Gokwe, said he now hears insurance adverts as performance because the hardest moment of life is where the support often disappears.
“If you miss one payment, they forget all the years you paid,” he said.
“All those promises on the radio that insurance would be there for us, and then they shut the door in your face when you falter just once,” he said.
Hove’s anger helps explain why the Rusape image resonated far beyond Manicaland.
It did not feel like a one-off dispute, but like a public unveiling of a private fear shared across households, that the policy is real only when money moves one way.
That fear is reinforced by what the regulator reports about churn in the life assurance market, particularly in the funeral-heavy segment that dominates low-income policies.
IPEC’s Life Assurance Sector Report for the nine months ended September 30, 2025, says the sector reported 19,493 “Not Taken Up” policies during the quarter under review, and Econet Life accounted for 15,051 of them.
The same report says the life assurance sector started the third quarter of 2025 with 2,122,824 active policies and recorded 97,111 policies lapsed during the period, and it attributes lapses mainly to affordability pressures and changes in policyholders’ circumstances. The report also highlights extreme lapse ratios in pockets of the market, including Nhaka Life reporting a lapse ratio of 27.59% during the review period.
Those numbers are not a detour from the story.
They are another lens on claimability because a truly usable product should not only sell at scale, but stay active long enough to protect households when risk turns into loss.
Mike Zvandasara, an independent economist, said high “not taken up” numbers often point to weak understanding at sign-up or affordability stress, while lapses show how quickly households drop out of protection when premiums collide with food, transport and school fees.
“When a claim is denied because a premium was missed, that lapse story stops being a statistic and becomes a coffin at a doorway,” Zvandasara said.
EcoSure’s response in Rusape framed the breakdown as an administrative failure rather than a deliberate refusal to pay, but the public interpreted the coffin as something else.
They saw a system that makes it easy to join and hard to benefit.
The industry says it is trying to narrow that gap, and one visible attempt is the Insurance Council of Zimbabwe’s “591” call centre for road accident claims support.
“The call centre will introduce a proactive approach to submission and processing of claims for all road accident calls,” said Ringisai Batiya, ICZ’s marketing manager.
Batiya said the centre is designed to guide people in real time, verify coverage where possible and reduce the number of cases that die quietly because the claimant did not understand the process or could not navigate it alone.
While the 591 model targets motor claims, the principle behind it is directly relevant to microinsurance, because it shifts the burden from the poorest customer to the system that sold the promise.
On the policy side, the government has also started framing microinsurance less as a product line and more as social protection, which raises the bar for how claims should work in practice.
Zimbabwe’s 2026 National Budget Statement says microinsurance “plays a significant social protection role” by mitigating risks faced by low-income households and SMEs, and it says the government seeks to strengthen the framework to improve availability and uptake.
That language matters because social protection is judged at the point of need, not at the point of marketing.
A peer-reviewed study on low-income insurance systems helps underline that the “claims moment” is where confidence is won or lost, even when enrolment looks good on paper.
In a 2022 peer-reviewed PLOS ONE study on community-based health insurance in Ethiopia, Hussien and colleagues wrote that “Almost all respondents indicated that a delay in claims reimbursement was one of the key problems experienced by insured households.”
The context is different from Zimbabwe’s funeral microinsurance, but the mechanism is familiar, because when claims drag, poor households stop seeing insurance as protection and start seeing it as another queue.
This is why definitions of microinsurance themselves keep circling back to claims as part of what makes the product “micro,” not merely the price.
A Society of Actuaries Research Institute research report on microinsurance in Africa defines microinsurance as something “characterised by simplicity of coverage … payment of premiums or contributions, claims reporting, and settlement.”
The coffin at Rusape suggested that Zimbabwe has improved the simplicity of premiums faster than it has improved the simplicity of claims.
Other African markets show that claimability improves when the burden of proof shifts away from the customer and when payouts are designed to travel as easily as premiums did.
A microinsurance compendium case example on Kenya’s rainfall index insurance model, Kilimo Salama, describes a system where the insurer calculates a claim percentage and then transfers the claim amount to the farmer’s M-PESA account, without a farm visit or paper-heavy loss assessment.
Zimbabwe does not need to copy Kenya to learn the principle, which is that inclusive insurance becomes real when the claim travels as easily as the premium did.
That can mean agent-assisted claims in the same communities where policies are sold, stable and minimal documentation lists that match rural realities, and product terms that treat irregular cash flow as normal rather than as a reason to exclude.
It can also mean applying grace-period logic consistently, so a missed US$4 becomes a deduction where the framework allows, rather than a total collapse of protection at the worst moment of life.
None of this removes the insurer’s legitimate concern about fraud, but Zimbabwe’s microinsurance framework already tells underwriters to balance controls with minimal documentation and streamlined processes, which means the system is supposed to be built for low-income realities, not retrofitted after public outrage.
In Rusape, the family did not stage a protest because they misunderstood insurance.
They protested because they understood it too well.
They understood that a funeral benefit is not a gift, but a contract paid for in small instalments that is supposed to show up when the household is at its weakest.
The coffin at the shop entrance forced a blunt national question that still hangs over every USSD sign-up.
If families must perform grief in public to unlock a benefit, what exactly is being sold when insurance is marketed as inclusive?
Gumbo said inclusion must be measured at payout, not purchase, and the regulator’s role is to keep pushing the market toward that reality, not that slogan.
And if a missed US$4 can still trigger a street confrontation because the system cannot absorb ordinary instability, then the next family will learn the same lesson in the same painful way.
The promise of microinsurance is simple.
When life breaks, the safety net should hold quietly, quickly and without a fight.
