Hima: Revolutionizing Micro Insurance for Boda Boda Riders

Visit: https://hima-insurance.vercel.app/

Welcome to the Future of Inclusive Insurance!

Hima is a WhatsApp-first micro-insurance platform that provides instant, low-cost protection for boda boda and informal transport riders, with payments handled via M‑Pesa and policy infrastructure secured on Mantle Network. Riders simply chat on WhatsApp to buy per-trip or short-term cover, manage their policies, and file claims, while all crypto and blockchain complexity is fully abstracted away from them.​

Market context and problem

Across East Africa, boda boda riders have become a backbone of urban and rural mobility, generating livelihoods for millions of young people but facing extremely high rates of road crashes, injuries, and fatalities with limited or no meaningful insurance. Traditional insurance products rely on annual premiums, paperwork, branches, and complex claims, which do not fit riders’ irregular incomes, time pressure, and mobile-first behaviour. When accidents occur, riders and their families often absorb hospital bills and lost income alone, pushing already vulnerable households into deeper financial stress.​

Solution: WhatsApp-native micro-insurance

Hima solves this gap by delivering instant micro-insurance through the channel riders already use every day: WhatsApp. Riders can onboard in minutes, choose per-trip, daily, or weekly cover, pay via M‑Pesa STK Push or Paybill, and receive clear confirmation of what is covered and for how long—without downloading an app, visiting a branch, or handling any crypto concepts. When an incident occurs, riders file claims directly in chat, sharing basic details and optional photos, and receive mobile money payouts if approved, turning a familiar conversation interface into a practical safety net.​

Blockchain infrastructure on Mantle

Behind the scenes, Hima uses Mantle Network to record policies, manage pooled risk capital, and track premium and claim flows in a transparent, auditable way. Policy records and risk pools are represented on-chain, enabling tokenized capital pools that back real-world cover for riders while still shielding them from any interaction with wallets, keys, or gas fees. This architecture allows institutional and on-chain liquidity providers to fund real-world road risk via standardized on-chain pools, positioning Hima as an emerging real-world-asset (RWA)-aligned insurtech layer while keeping the front-end experience purely fiat and chat-based.​

Business model and scalability

Hima’s revenue model combines embedded premiums per policy with potential fees or profit-sharing arrangements with insurers and capital providers that participate in the on-chain pools. The WhatsApp + M‑Pesa design matches riders’ existing habits, driving low-friction adoption and enabling high-frequency, small-ticket transactions that are economical thanks to automation and on-chain settlement. Because the architecture is modular—swapping in local payment rails, messaging channels, and regulated insurance partners—Hima can expand from Kenya to other African markets and eventually to global emerging economies with similar informal transport and gig worker segments.​

Impact and vision

Hima’s goal is to transform high-risk informal transport work into a more secure and dignified livelihood by making meaningful protection as simple as sending a message. In the near term, this means more riders covered, faster claims, and reduced financial shocks for households; in the long term, it creates a new digital rail for road-risk protection that can support delivery riders, gig workers, and low-income commuters across Africa and beyond. By fusing conversational interfaces, local payment rails, and an RWA-ready on-chain backbone, Hima demonstrates how inclusive finance can be both radically accessible to non-crypto users and deeply integrated with modern blockchain-based capital markets.