Role of insurance in post disaster recovery planning in business community

Abstract

The whole world is facing a substantial of natural disasters which brings severe damages throughout the world. Attention must be vgiven to rehabilitate the business community that is affected by these disasters. However, improper planning for recovering damages in business community becomes a major issue when it obstructs the continuation and development of the business community. Therefore, required measures should be taken to avoid collapsing of development of the business community affected by disasters. In this context, insurance plays a vital role to reinstate the business while reducing the financial consequences of the disaster. This study investigates the role of insurance as a provision to recover the disastrous destruction of the business community in Sri Lanka. To achieve this, the survey method was used as the approach and semi structured interviews carried out within five experts from insurance sector and eight experts from the business community. Content analysis was used to analyze the collected data from the empirical study. The analysis of the findings based on two areas of insurers’ and insured’ perception of insurance. One of the major finding was that the insurance is not extended to any frequent disaster prone area of the country unless accepted by the insured with either higher premium amount or higher amount of deductible. As per the insurer’s side, some issues of the current practice are identified as less awareness, dishonesty and fraudulent practice of the insured which leads to less identification of the insurance as a risk management strategy within the business community. According to the insured, main purposes of obtaining insurance are quick recovery of business and to fulfil the borrowing requirements. Recommendations were developed as increase the awareness, educating and the government participation to increase the insurance penetration to the business community.