When Fonden—Mexico’s natural disaster insurance fund—was created in 1996, initially it was born as a budget account only. This was not the best idea, because in the end the money all ultimately returned to the treasury, and funds could not be retained the following year to capitalize the fund. That’s why Fonden changed in 1999 to become a trust, which works much better. For us, the biggest challenge at the start was collecting the data to feed into the risk model we would use, because Fonden didn’t have any information about public infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and so on. It was not an expensive endeavor compared to the cost of reconstruction after disasters, though, and surprisingly we found that we already had a lot of data housed with our federal entities. The best example was in schools. The Ministry of Education had developed over two years a big project to obtain all key information about schools... — blogs.adb.org/blog