Dr John Ofori-Tenkorang, the Director-General of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT), has stated that the introduction of the Ghana Card will revolutionize the pensions sector and increase pension penetration in the country.
According to the Director-General of SSNIT, the introduction of the Ghana card will make it easier to enrol a lot of people into the pension scheme because data on them would be readily available.
“The Ghana Card, for me, is going to be a game-changer. It’s going to be a game-changer because you see, previously, when you sign somebody onto SSNIT, they have to take their biometric, you have to collect all their personal data, as well as the work-related data. Thank God through the Ghana card, all these information or I say most of them has been provided to the National Identification Authority.”
Dr John Ofori-Tenkorang
Dr John Ofori-Tenkorang asserted that because the registration process now is very easy and less cumbersome, it is easy to persuade prospective SSNIT contributors to join the scheme.
“So, when I come to you and I convince you that you have to join and you decide to join, all you have to do is to give me your Ghana card. I swipe it and immediately, I have all the information on you including: your telephone number, your email address if any. How old you are; your date of birth and all those stuffs. If we need to add any additional information, it will be minimal information… And now, we are able to also identify you biometrically; because you have the Ghana Card, we don’t need to take a new set of fingerprints. So, that makes it easy.”
Dr John Ofori-Tenkorang
SSNIT Plans to Make Payment of Dues Convenience
Dr Ofori-Tenkorang also highlighted efforts that his outfit is making to make payments of dues convenient for SSNIT contributors. He disclosed that SSNIT as an organisation has outlined some payment methods that will help contributors.
“The other thing that I think is going to make it easy for us to make inroads is the mode of payment that we are going to roll out. One of them is going to be payments through mobile money. When your SIM cards are linked to your Ghana cards and so on and so forth, all these things become seamless. We have come up with a back end platform that allows payments to be made through MoMo [Mobile Money] to integrate directly into our systems.”
Dr John Ofori-Tenkorang
Recent data from the Ghana Statistical Service’s Population and Housing Census (PHC) indicate that 10.8 million of the population are workers, out of which just about 1.7 million workers are covered by SSNIT. A situation the Director-General expressed concern over, while calling on the relevant stakeholders to put in the required effort to close the gap.
Meanwhile, SSNIT has recently announced that all Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) contributors will replace their unique scheme identification numbers with the Ghana Card identification numbers.
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