Jihan had her Damascus moment while on holiday in the coastal city of Mombasa, where she grew up.
The year was 2019, and Jihan, who by then was a commodity trader in London, had just visited Mombasa from the UK where she studied. She studied Finance at the City University of London, which explains her work in commodities. She also holds an MBA from Oxford University.
Having been brought up in a well-off family, Jihan was struck by a confession by a waiter that she did not have an insurance cover. Privilege might have shielded her from the harsh reality of the millions of poor Kenyans.
She saw an opportunity to help uninsured Kenyans, and herself as well. She came up with Lami Direct Insurance, a company that provides digital car insurance solutions in Kenya.
"You need to step up and come into space."
“Only three percent of Africans had insurance,” remembers Jihan. She decided to take the approach of tech, something that she says did not exist in the market. “Our approach is to empower intermediaries to use our technology to distribute insurance,” said Jihan.
Starting was not a smooth sail for Abass. Like many start-ups at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, venture capital was limited in the market.
Before they got the $5.5 million funding, they unsuccessfully knocked on the doors of a lot of venture capital in the world. It was tougher that she was a woman, and even tougher that it was a woman venturing into a male-dominated insurance industry.
The top honchos in insurance, she reckons, tend to be old and stuck in the business world as it is.
“But you need to step up and come into space. We were the first to ever digitise the market here and open the market for others.”
– By Dominic Omondi
