Cover that keeps your business trading.

Insurance as Business Continuity

Every business carries risk that it cannot fully control. A fire in a warehouse, an employee injured on site, a customer claim over faulty goods, a burglary that takes out the entire stock of a retail unit. Individually these events are unlikely. Across the lifetime of a business, something in that category is close to inevitable.

Commercial insurance is not a compliance exercise. It is the mechanism that allows a business to absorb a serious loss and keep operating. The objective is not to insure against everything, which would be unaffordable, but to identify the losses your balance sheet genuinely could not absorb and transfer those to an underwriter. Minova's role is to help you draw that line accurately.

Commercial Property and Fire Cover

Property cover protects the physical assets your business depends on: buildings you own or occupy, plant and machinery, office equipment, furniture, fittings, and stock. The core section responds to fire, lightning, and explosion, and is normally extended to a wider set of perils.

• Fire, lightning, and explosion: The foundation of every commercial property programme.
• Flood, storm, and water damage: Including damage from burst pipes and sprinkler leakage.
• Burglary and theft: Loss of stock, equipment, and fittings following forcible entry to the premises.
• Riot, strike, and civil commotion: An important consideration for premises in commercial districts and during election periods.
• Impact damage: Where vehicles or falling objects damage your premises.
• Electronic equipment and machinery breakdown: Sudden and unforeseen damage to servers, industrial equipment, and specialist plant.
• Money cover: Cash in transit, in a safe, and on the premises during and outside business hours.

Stock values on many policies are set once and never revisited. If your stock holding fluctuates seasonally, a declaration-linked basis often serves better than a fixed sum insured, and Minova can arrange it.

Business Interruption

This is the cover most often missing from Kenyan commercial programmes, and the one that most often determines whether a business survives a major loss. Property insurance rebuilds your premises and replaces your equipment. It does nothing about the months of lost trading while that work is under way, during which salaries, rent, loan repayments, and other fixed costs continue.

Business interruption cover replaces lost gross profit and continuing fixed expenses for an agreed indemnity period, commonly twelve to twenty-four months. Setting that period realistically is the critical decision, and it should reflect how long it would genuinely take to rebuild, re-equip, restock, and rebuild your customer base, not simply how long the construction would take. Minova works through that calculation with you.

Employee Cover and WIBA Compliance

Under the Work Injury Benefits Act, every Kenyan employer is legally obliged to compensate employees for work-related injury, illness, or death, regardless of fault. WIBA cover funds that obligation, meeting statutory compensation scales for medical expenses, temporary and permanent incapacity, and death benefits.

Many employers supplement statutory WIBA cover with a group personal accident policy, which extends protection beyond working hours and typically pays benefits on a more generous basis. Employers running teams in higher-hazard environments, such as construction, manufacturing, transport, and security, should review both the limits and the wage declarations annually, since under-declaring your wage roll will reduce a claim settlement.

Public and Product Liability

Public liability covers your legal liability for bodily injury to third parties or damage to their property arising from your business operations. A customer injured on your premises, damage caused by your staff while working at a client site, or a delivery that damages a third party's property all fall within this section.

Product liability responds where goods you manufacture, supply, or distribute cause injury or damage after leaving your control. Manufacturers, importers, food businesses, and distributors carry meaningful exposure here, and the limits required are usually higher than owners expect. Where you contract with larger organisations, minimum liability limits are frequently written into the contract, and Minova will make sure your cover meets those requirements.

Professional Indemnity

If your business provides advice, designs, or professional services, your greatest exposure may not be physical at all. Professional indemnity covers financial loss a client suffers because of negligent advice, an error, an omission, or a breach of professional duty on your part, along with the legal costs of defending the allegation.

Consultants, engineers, architects, accountants, IT firms, medical practitioners, and insurance intermediaries all need this cover, and for several regulated professions in Kenya it is a condition of practice. Professional indemnity is written on a claims-made basis, meaning the policy in force when the claim is notified responds, not the one in force when the work was done. That makes continuous cover and correct retroactive dates essential, and it is an area where Minova pays close attention to the wording.

Fidelity Guarantee and Directors' Liability

Fidelity guarantee cover responds to direct financial loss caused by dishonest acts of your own employees, such as theft of cash or fraudulent manipulation of accounts. Businesses handling cash, inventory, or client funds carry real exposure that no property policy addresses.

Directors' and officers' liability protects the personal assets of directors and senior managers against claims alleging wrongful acts in their management of the company, including regulatory investigations, employment practice claims, and shareholder actions. As corporate governance expectations tighten in Kenya, this cover has moved from optional to expected for boards of any substance.

Building the Right Programme

Businesses rarely need every cover described here, and buying a standard package off the shelf usually produces a programme with both gaps and waste. Minova starts by understanding how your business actually earns money and what would stop it: which assets are critical, which liabilities are contractual, how long you could survive without trading, and where your industry's claims tend to arise. From there we build a programme, place it with rated underwriters, and review it as the business changes.

We also act for you when it matters most. When a claim arises, we prepare and present it, deal with loss adjusters, and press for prompt, fair settlement so that your management team can concentrate on getting the business back to normal.