Nigeria does not have a retail "income protection insurance" product in the sense that exists in the UK, US, or South Africa — a policy that pays you a monthly income, indefinitely, for any illness or injury that stops you working. What AIICO and Custodian Life actually sell under related names — Personal Accident cover and Criticare (critical illness) from AIICO, and Personal Accident plus riders from Custodian Life — pay a lump sum or a capped weekly benefit, and only when a narrow, named trigger occurs: an accident, or one of a short list of critical illnesses. If a Nigerian freelancer is bedridden for six weeks with typhoid, a slipped disc, or a bad bout of depression, none of these mainstream products pay out, because none of those events are "accidents" or on the critical-illness list. That gap matters more to freelancers than to salaried staff, because freelancers have no employer sick pay to fall back on.
AIICO does not market a product literally called "income protection." The two products that come closest are:
- Personal Accident Plan — pays a lump-sum death benefit (around ₦250,000 on the standard unit, scalable with more units), medical expense reimbursement (capped around ₦50,000, incurred within 30 days of the accident), and a disability payout — but only if the injury was caused by an accident. It does not pay out for illness. Cover starts from day one with no waiting period, and a basic unit has been priced around ₦1,500 flat premium (AIICO).
- Criticare — a lump-sum critical-illness plan covering five conditions: cancer, stroke, heart attack, kidney failure, and major organ transplant. It carries a one-year waiting period before a claim can be made, and a real-world quote shows a 35-year-old paying roughly ₦18,246/month for a ₦25,000,000 sum assured over a 25-year term (AIICO Criticare).
- All-in-One Financial Protection — a stripped-down bundle (Personal Accident + Hospital Cash + a deferred annuity) built for low-income earners, backed by LeapFrog Investments and the European Investment Bank, priced from about ₦800/year for the accident cover and ₦5,000/year for hospital cash (BusinessDay). It's cheap and better than nothing, but the sums assured are small relative to a real monthly income.
None of these pay a recurring monthly benefit tied to your actual earnings the way a salary-replacement policy would.
Custodian's flagship product in this space is Personal Accident Insurance, sold both to employer groups and, separately, to individuals (Custodian, individual; Custodian, group). It provides 24-hour cover and pays a cash benefit for death or permanent disability arising from an accident — again, accident only, not illness. Custodian Life Assurance separately confirms that disability cover, critical illness, and accidental medical expenses can be attached as riders to an individual life policy (Custodian Life FAQs). In practice this usually means a waiver-of-premium benefit (your life policy stays active without you paying premiums while disabled) rather than a monthly cash payout to live on — a meaningful protection, but not the same thing as income replacement.
This is the part freelancers most often get wrong when they assume they're "covered." The Nigerian market's standard personal accident policy structure, as recognised by NAICOM, can include a Temporary Total Disablement benefit — a weekly cash payment, capped at a maximum of 104 weeks — but this only applies to disablement caused by an accident, not general sickness. Neither AIICO's nor Custodian's retail marketing pages spell out whether their standard individual accident unit includes this weekly benefit by default or only as an optional extension, so it's worth asking the agent directly and getting it in writing before you assume it's there.
More importantly: malaria complications, a herniated disc, burnout, pregnancy complications, or a mental-health crisis — the illnesses that most commonly take a freelancer offline for weeks — sit in neither the "accident" bucket nor the five-condition Criticare list. If income replacement for ordinary illness is what you're picturing, this is the coverage that doesn't currently exist as a mainstream retail product from either insurer.
Health insurance (an HMO plan, or AIICO's Multishield) is built to pay your hospital bills — consultations, admission, surgery, drugs. It does nothing for the income you lose while you're too sick to invoice clients. A freelancer can have excellent health cover, get treated free of charge, and still go three months without pay because no policy is replacing the missing income. Health insurance and income protection solve two completely different problems, and neither AIICO nor Custodian markets a product that does both.
Life insurance (Custodian Life's core business, and AIICO's life plans) pays a lump sum to your beneficiaries when you die. It is not designed to support you while you're alive but unable to work. The one overlap is the waiver-of-premium rider mentioned above, which keeps a life policy alive during disability — useful, but it protects your policy, not your rent.
Given the actual shape of the Nigerian market, a realistic protection stack looks like: (1) an HMO or private health plan for medical bills, (2) a personal accident policy for the accident scenario, ideally one that confirms a weekly temporary-disablement benefit in writing, (3) a critical-illness rider like Criticare for the five named major illnesses, accepting the one-year wait, and (4) a self-funded emergency buffer — three to six months of committed bills — for every other kind of illness or injury that falls outside all of the above. That fourth layer is doing more real work than most freelancers realise, precisely because it's the only one that pays out for the ordinary things that actually happen.
Kampe doesn't sell insurance and never touches your money — it's a read-only tool that pulls your accounts and subscriptions into one view and helps you plan. What it can do is make the size of that emergency-buffer gap visible: your Spendable number already nets out committed bills and goal auto-saves, so you can see, in naira and dollars, exactly how many weeks of "can't invoice" your current buffer would actually cover — and set a goal to close the gap before you need the insurance you don't have.