Fifty trainees of the International Institute of Insurance (IIA) are now ready for the job market. The fresh insurers were presented to the public in Yaounde, Saturday November 17, 2018, in a graduation ceremony presided over by the Minister of Finance, Louis Paul Motaze, in the company of other government ministers.

The trainees are part of the 2016-2018 intake of students of the regional institute. They underwent a 24-month technical and practical training, with six months of intensive industrial placement in administration or insurance companies. While 27 students of the 23rd batch earned ‘Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures Spécialisées en Assurance (DESS-A)’, the other 23 of the 13th batch graduated with ‘Maîtrise en Sciences et Techniques d’Assurance (MST-A)’. Both programmes registered 100 per cent passes, officials of IIA told Cameroon Tribune.

Going by Urbain Philippe Adjanon, Director General of IIA, who presented a speech on behalf of the institute’s board chair, they tailored their training to reflect new realities in the insurance sector in Francophone Africa, notably micro-insurance and agric-insurance.

Different speakers at the graduation ceremony called on the laureates to ameliorate the image of insurance on the continent by promptly paying reasonable amounts as indemnities to the insured. The graduates were also urged to show proof of the high quality of training received. Also, they were told to show humility, innovation and dynamism in the fast-changing digital world.

In the last 45 years, IIA has trained 721 DESS-A and 267 MST-A holders. The institute was created in 1972 in Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire. It is opened to citizens of member countries of the Inter-African Conference on Insurance Markets (CIMA): Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, CAR, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Guinée Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo and Chad.