Reminiscing the year gone by and the journey with Uplift.

Come Dec 2024, Uplift will complete 2 decades of building grounds up health insurance for the poor in India. As the 20th year begins, I am reminded of all that we have traversed, all the kindness and blessings and support we have received and all the people who have built Uplift with their hard work. Health insurance is an extremely difficult line of business and within that microinsurance and within that community based or mutual makes the going tougher.

The one thing that has kept us going is our razor-sharp focus on delivering value to low-income households as our primary focus and ensuring that we keep striving to close the health protection gap. We have built evidence that communities can run their own health insurance sustainably and if the macro factors improve, can also scale up. While in the timescale of a successful insurance organization, we are still very small, a child, in terms of our learnings we have substantial insights that help us build better solutions.

Last year we broke new ground with the truck driver health mutual insurance covering over 11,000 truck drivers in the JNPT area and we are on course to improving upon this. We also launched our retail products, especially the one covering Outpatient care (PLUS-O) which has had a tremendous response. We also became one of the first microsites to generate the ABHA ID cards across our outpatient care mobile medical units.

One of the most challenging yet rewarding was our prolonged efforts in signing up with people with disabilities for the mutual health insurance offering and I am glad that we could bring in the very first batch of about 200 PWDs into the Uplift mutual health protection programme. We are working on a whole new way of understanding as to how to service them and build the sensitivities involved in doing so.

2023 will be remembered as a catalytic year for Uplift for we have decided to expand our health financing portfolio to include maternity wallets and emergency medical finance. Against the backdrop of the data insights of 30,000 households surveyed in 2021-22 in and around Mumbai, it became clear to us that despite the success of flagship public health protection programmes, low-income households are forced to take loans for financing their health expenses including child delivery expenses. Low-income households take loans for medical reasons anywhere between 36-60% interest that too without assurance that they will get quality care. With our comprehensive health financing product, we hope to change this.

Maternity wallets are aimed at helping pregnant women financially plan their childbirth expenses, save for the event and provide bridge financing in case the savings are not enough along with Uplift’s navigation and medical support throughout the maternity cycle. Emergency medical finance aims to provide low-cost health financing support to low-income households without having to provide salary slips and again with Uplift’s navigation and medical support to access quality care at reasonable rates.

As 2024 starts I feel both humbled and overwhelmed at all the support we have got to do all of this. Whether it’s from our tech partner Quorum Software or our programme supporters Opportunity International Australia , USAID Samagra and SAMRIDH Blended Finance Facility , IIMA Ventures or individuals who have helped us design and deliver high impact products on ground or mentors who have been kind enough to share their insights with us.

As we go in 2024, I want to say #thankyou with a deep sense of #gratitude and a promise that we at Uplift will do our very best!

Titiksha Mukherjee Payal Agarwal Bapusaheb Bhosale Alka Parikh Dr. Shariq Nisar Anuradha Jain Neeta Rao Suma Pathy Dr. Nandini KS Vrushali Vengurlekar Vandana Tripathi, PhD Abhishek A. Jennifer Jones Eros Gautam Priyanka Agarwal Chopra Sanjay Jain Kingshuk Chakraborty Kiran Reddy Avuthu Jehaan Kotwal Sumedh Mane Krishna Thacker Sudheer Nadipally Manjunath Shankar Prabhat Sharma Dr. Amit Shah