Freetown — "Our nations are severely challenged by high level of sickness, accidents and deaths. The insurance industry could help our nations reverse these adverse trends," said Sierra Leone's President Ernest Bai Koroma who was presenting a paper on insurance in Nigeria.

The onetime insurance broker told the 2009 Education Conference of the Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria (CIIN) on Friday that a strong partnership between government and the insurance industry would reduce wastages of government resources in the sub-region.

"When this partnership is effected, insurance could become part of a monitoring, investigating and evaluation trajectory that could help ensure the successful implementation of development projects", he said.

He urged insurance professionals to make their expertise available to the different tiers of government in the country, saying it was the only way to show their relevance in the economy.

"Our relevance to national development is contingent in the deployment of our strengths, resources and goodwill to meeting the challenges of our people. A key step in increasing our relevance in national development is lending our expertise to government.

"Our governance system is in dire need of persons skilled in the actuarial sciences, risks management, corporate governance, resource mobilisation and prudent investment. I have a number of insurers in my cabinet. They are doing well not only because they take risks but because they do so with the prudence of insurers," he said.

Speaking at the conference which coincided with the 50th Anniversary ceremony of the professional body, the visiting president identified some of the areas that he believed insurance practitioners could help address some of the anomalies in the sub-regional economy including reverse the negative trend the health sector and wastages of government resources.

"Our nations are severely challenged by high level of sickness, accidents and deaths. The insurance industry could help our nations reverse these adverse trends. We could lend our actuarial expertise to efforts aimed at understanding the causes and incidence of these manifestations of social malaise and to devise measure to minimize their occurrence or mitigate their consequences on individuals, families and communities," the president said.