Peoples Pension Trust (PPT), a licensed Corporate Trustee in Ghana, has entered into a partnership with Swiss Capacity Building Facility (SCBF), a public-private development platform, to launch a new pension scheme program called Scaling Gender-Focused Financial Resilience (SGFR).
According to the Peoples Pension Trust, the new SGFR will support informal sector, marginalised and excluded female workers, and entrepreneurs to secure their future through micro-pensions.
Ghana’s informal sector workforce is predominately women, accounting for 54.9 per cent of Medium and Small-Scale Enterprises. Based on this, PPT noted that “this new programme will catalyse participation in pensions that will allow women to contribute small payments for long-term savings, and have access to 50 per cent of their contributions for immediate needs if necessary.”
The Chief Executive Officer of SCBF, Sitara Merchant, indicated that the programme is targeted to reach 100,000 new customers, with 60 per cent active female savers.
“SGFR will accomplish this by partnering with women-based organisations to improve outreach and leveraging technology-based solutions to increase financial literacy and understanding of the benefits of long-term savings.”
Sitara Merchant
The Chief Executive Officer of SCBF iterated that “Innovating financial inclusion is at the core of our work. By expanding financial inclusion, we build resilience to protect living standards, advance economic empowerment to increase income and asset building, and improve current and future generations’ living standards.”
SGFR Programme to Focus on Key Demographics
Sitara Merchant stated that the SGFR Programme will leverage on technology to run the program and to make it effective.
“Fully aligned with our ambitions, focusing on our key demographic, women. Furthermore, we know that working with the private sector, specifically innovative technology providers is critical, and that the work of such partners can be more effective when complemented with public-sector and philanthropic frameworks and partnerships, core to this intervention.”
Sitara Merchant
Ms Merchant moreover estimated that in the next 40 years, the share of Ghanaians over 60 years old would double from seven per cent to 15 per cent. Quoting the World Bank 2019, she thus highlighted the ‘extending pension coverage to the Informal Sector in Africa report’, noting that one of the challenges in designing an informal sector pension scheme is reaching geographically dispersed people.
The CEO of Peoples Pension Trust, Saqib Nazir, averred that women are critical in the development of pension products. As such, she assured women of developing products to improve their accessibility.
“Our business model is based on addressing the main factors for their [women] exclusion by developing innovative, flexible, and digitally driven pension products to improve accessibility even to no-internet areas. From a commercial perspective, women are a critical demographic that tends to outperform their male peers on contributions and savings, however, they represent a lower percentage of our overall client base.”
Saqib Nazir
Saqib Nazir stated that the partnership with SBCF would allow PPT to better reach women through the development of gender-focused technology solutions and partnerships that support a more inclusive approach to reaching women, informal sector; from a positioning and financial literacy perspective.
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