Fostering resilient societies: Swiss Re Foundation

We want to build resilient societies

Who we are

The Swiss Re Foundation’s vision is to help societies build capacity to mitigate health, environmental and economic risks, as well as recover quickly from setbacks. We do this in emerging countries and where Swiss Re has office locations.

Together with our partners, we aim to achieve measurable and sustainable impacts. We support them through evidence-based grant funding and give them access to the broad expertise of Swiss Re’s employees. In this way, we strive to foster resilient societies and support Swiss Re’s sustainability objectives.

Our commitment in times of the COVID-19 pandemic

The Swiss Re Foundation’s global set-up meant the pandemic was a concern for us at an early stage. Starting in Asia, it ultimately became a defining event in all our partner countries. To this day, many of our partner organisations are still suffering from the direct and increasingly indirect consequences of the pandemic.

After the Swiss Re Group decided to increase its annual support to the Swiss Re Foundation by more than CHF 5 million for 2020 due to the pandemic, we quickly set up a comprehensive global COVID-19 programme. Its aim was to provide rapid and unbureaucratic support to our existing partners in 29 countries in their efforts to deal with the direct and indirect impact of the pandemic. Within three months, based on a clearly structured assessment process, we were able to support selected partners with more than 80 financial assistance packages. This support also helped them cover their running costs, which would have otherwise threatened their financial viability.

The main goals of the campaign, however, were firstly to finance the purchase of protective material our partners needed. Secondly, we wanted to provide targeted financing of their special projects in connection with the focus area Access to Health.

In addition to our global support effort, our 2020 portfolio development, totalling CHF 5 596 000, also devoted attention to our focus area natural hazards and climate risk management. We sharpened our strategy and defined approaches and goals in the selected three niches of enhancing disaster risk reduction at the community level, coastal resilience and climate-smart agriculture.

To achieve our goals in these niches we have partnered with several innovators and researchers. These individuals and organisations foster resilience by strengthening the risk management capacities of poor communities. The inhabitants of such communities are not only the most vulnerable to the impacts of disasters, environmental degradation and climate risk, but also the least well equipped to cope with them afterwards.

Swiss Re Foundation