Adnan Adams Mohammed
The Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) has indicated plans to rollout an aggressive membership drive to rope in about one million contributors from the informal sector by next year.
This, will be about two-quarters or more of the existing membership of SSNIT mostly from the formal sectors of the economy. SSNIT, is however, confident of achieving the target while changing the existing narrative.
Currently, out of the over 11 million workers in the country, less than 2 million of them are active SSNIT contributors, leaving about nine million workers not registered on any pension scheme. Indicating that, the informal sector dominates the yet to be registered fraction.
“From our own data you find out that out of all the people that are in the informal sector who could have enrolled on our pension scheme, there’s only about some 14,000 who have signed up, which is very, very minimal. So, the terrain is wide open and this program that we are embarking on, my hope is that maybe a year after we have rolled out this campaign, we can get as much as about a million people”, Director-General of SSNIT, Dr Ofori Tenkorang said when he spoke to the media on the sidelines of a stakeholder engagement on the national pension scheme provider’s planned campaign to extend coverage to the informal sector.
He added that “I know it’s a very aggressive target because people need to buy into the idea that they too can join this scheme. People need to disabuse themselves of the notion that giving your money to SSNIT is a waste, especially people in the informal sector who feel that they need the money now, not for some time later, which for them sometimes they think will never come.”
