Increasing agricultural efficiency via technology adoption remains a high priority among development
practitioners. One potential tool for furthering this objective is using drought index insurance to increase
access to credit. Accordingly, the objective of this paper is to investigate whether coupling agricultural
loans with micro-level and meso-level drought index insurance can stimulate the demand and supply of
credit and increase technology adoption. To this end, in partnership with 14 rural banks and the Ghana
Agricultural Insurance Pool, we implemented a randomized control trial in northern Ghana that targeted
maize farmers organized in credit groups. Our empirical analysis indicates that coupling loans with mesoinsurance
increases the likelihood of loan approval by 23 percentage points. Gender-level analysis shows
that micro-insurance-coupled loans increase the likelihood of loan application for females while mesoinsurance-coupled
loans increase the likelihood of loan approval for both females and males, but with a
larger impact for males. Overall, our results indicate that insured loans hold significant promise for
expanding credit access and technology adoption among smallholder farmers.