Over the past decade, First for Women is the only insurer to have claimed the Top Short-Term Insurer title three times.
First for Women Insurance has once again been named as South Africa’s Top Short-Term Insurer in the ASK AFRICA Orange IndexTM . Its win streak began in 2017 and its back-to-back wins in 2025 and 2026 make it the most awarded insurer in the Index, a distinction unmatched by any other insurer.
The ASK AFRICA Orange IndexTM has run since 2001 and is South Africa’s longest-running consumer experience benchmark, built on large-scale consumer interviews that measure service satisfaction and emotional connection.
“A single strong year can happen for all kinds of reasons – a good campaign, a quiet season, a competitor’s bad quarter. A result that repeats itself, measured the same independent way each time, only happens for one reason: the company kept showing up. A decade of independent measurement tells you something a single good year cannot. It tells you that women who called us during an accident, a break-in or a difficult month kept experiencing the same standard of service, year after year,” says Dr Reitumetse Mpholle, First for Women’s Senior Manager of Insights and Research Initiatives.
Three findings from the First for Women Her & Now 2026 report, A World Built for Someone Else – drawn from the voices of more than 6,500 South African women gathered since 2025 – give this result its urgency. Only 9.2% of women mostly or completely trust government and public services. First for Women was shaped around the reality of a woman’s actual day rather than a policy written for someone else’s life.
“The real takeout of our research has always been that the reality women live in needs to be redesigned. We’re not asking for everything to be built around us – just to be accommodated. When women grow, the effect on their whole family and community is bigger than anyone expects,” says Dr Reitumetse Mpholle.
“Congratulations to First for Women on this back-to-back result. This reflects real, sustained trust from the customers who keep choosing First for Women, year after year,” says Maria Petousis, Executive for Target Group Index (TGI) and Benchmarks at ASK AFRICA.
First for Women’s customer focus sits alongside its work supporting South African women more broadly. Since 2005, the First for Women Foundation has raised more than R110 million from comprehensively insured premiums and supported more than 170,000 women affected by gender-based violence. The brand’s second edition Her & Now report, A World Built for Someone Else, was released this Women’s Month and draws on more than 6,500 South African women’s voices gathered since 2025.
“This result belongs to the women who called us, not the other way around. Every claim we settle, every panic button that gets answered at two in the morning, every policy we design around a life that looks nothing like the standard template, is what the ASK AFRICA Orange IndexTM results is actually measuring. We do not treat that as a finished job. It is the standard we intend to keep meeting,” concludes Seugnette van Wyngaard, Executive Head of First for Women Insurance.