Inter-African Conference on Insurance Markets (CIMA)
Organization harmonizing insurance law and regulation across fourteen French-speaking African countries.
The Inter-African Conference on Insurance Markets is a regional organization that harmonizes insurance law and supervision across fourteen West and Central African states, mainly French-speaking. It rests on a single code, the CIMA code, which defines common rules applicable to contracts, companies and supervision, and on shared regulatory institutions. This integration aims to strengthen insurers' financial soundness, protect policyholders and foster the development of a still weakly penetrated market, where the share of the population covered remains very small. Reforms have raised minimum capital requirements to consolidate a fragmented sector. For international groups and reinsurers, the CIMA zone represents a market with strong long-term growth potential, driven by demography and the rise of a middle class, but exposed to specific risks: instability, weak data, distribution constraints. Knowledge of the CIMA framework is essential to approach insurance in French-speaking Africa.
Textbook case: an insurer seeking to establish itself in French-speaking West Africa must comply with the CIMA code, stemming from the treaty signed in Yaoundé on July 10, 1992, and its capital requirements common to the fourteen member states.
CIMA, CIMA code, CIMA zone, francophone African insurance markets
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