The Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) has announced the commencement of a mass enrollment of the informal sector onto its pension scheme by January 2023.

This announcement was made at the SSNIT Employers’ Breakfast meeting in Accra.

According to the Director General, Dr. John Ofori-Tenkorang, extensive consultations with stakeholders in the informal sector and the need to ensure that systems which will enhance the enrollment of the sector onto the scheme are fully operational, are the reasons why the process has taken a longer time than expected.

“The people in the informal sector form the majority of workers in the country and we need to reach out to them”.

“In order to reach out to them, we had to do stakeholder engagements to get them to understand their needs and whether they will embrace our products. Thankfully, they expressed interest in signing onto the scheme. The way the self-employed sector is, they operate in groups and we needed to get to them through their groups”, he explained.

The Director General also stated that the Trust is awaiting the operationalisation of a new system before the big launch

“What we were waiting to do before we do a big launch was that we were waiting to operationalize a new system which allows people to onboard with a Ghana Card, and allows mobile money and other digital payment systems”.

On the operationalisation of the platform, Dr. Tenkorang said the platform is now active and everyone can make their SSNIT contributions through direct debit, Mobile Money and other digital payment platforms. “Thank God that platforms went live on the 10th of October so it has become easy for people in that sector to pay their contributions”, he stressed.

He further stated that, by January 2023, we should expect the mass enrollment of people in the informal sector onto the scheme.

“Now that we have done that, very soon, you will see staff of SSNIT going into the markets to sign them on with the use of the Ghana card. At the beginning of January [2023], we should be able to get this fully running”.