I posted this on a separate thread in case anybody wants to discuss it but for Africa overlanders it is relevant.

Many overlanders talk of buying Brown Card insurance when travelling in West Africa. This insurance is often sold at borders and the agents selling it say it is valid in all the ECOWAS countries. That means it pretty much covers you from Mauritania to Nigeria. I have bought it in the past but on speaking to real insurance agents, they tell me it is invalid. They tell me that the problem is that the Brown Card is not actually and insurance in its own right. It only extends the cover of an existing policy to other ECOWAS countries. If you're familiar with the old European system it is the equivalent of a Green Card, you still need to have an insurance policy on your vehicle in your home country.
For a Brown Card to be valid, you would have to have valid insurance on your vehicle in an ECOWAS country, then the Brown Card would extend your cover to other ECOWAS countries. Overlanders with vehicles which are not registered in an ECOWAS country are not likely to have a local insurance policy upon which Brown Card insurance could be added. A search of the official Brown Card insurance web sites seems to confirm this. Also, Brown Cards must be typed, not hand written. As I understand it now, if you buy hand written Brown Card insurance at a border you are effectively buying a piece of paper which the police will accept as insurance because they don't know what they are looking at but in the event of an accident, when the insurance is checked, it will be found to be fake. I'd like to know the experience of others with the Brown Card for overlanders.

Whoa! That’s definitely valuable info.
My bike insurance has limited annual mileage (I mainly use my other bike). I was telling myself that didn’t matter because once I got to Africa my UK insurers would be off-risk, and I could even cancel the policy.
Clearly life is not that simple.
So it seems I will need:
- to get the mileage limit increased, and
- to take with me my UK insurance Certificate and Schedule (as well as an electronic copy and several hard copies).
Thanks for the additional crucial intel.

One obvious question would be whether a Brown Card--the real thing, not the fake version--will extend your UK insurance, or do you actually need local insurance as is stated in the post above yours (to which a Brown Card can be added).

In other words, I can't see any reason to carry multiple copies of your UK insurance certificate....but this is all news to me. I've rented quite a few bikes in West Africa and all came with local insurance, some with Brown Cards coverage. I used only one to cross borders, and nobody cared in the slightest.