The National Insurance Commission (NIC) commits to training the youth on insurance activities to improve its insurance penetration and coverage ratio, which remains relatively low at 1 percent.
To pursue this, the National Insurance Commission in partnership with the National Insurance College, the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) of the Ghana Police Service, and the National Service Secretariat (NSS), is embarking on an exercise to train and deploy several Ghanaian youths on the streets, to inspect and also, educate people on the need to insure their vehicles.
This new partnership will hopefully grow the insurance industry significantly, the NIC added.
Ashanti Regional Manager of National Insurance Commission, Kofi Baffour Nsenkyire, speaking in an interview, intimated that “according to records available to the National Insurance Commission, insurance penetration is currently about 1%. The Commissioner of Insurance, together with the Ghana Insurance Association, thinks something needs to be done about it. There is more room for improvement. As a result of this, the Commission has taken it upon itself through the Commissioner of Insurance to liaise with the Ghana Insurance College to train ten thousand youth in insurance. The Commission is sponsoring the programme.”
“At the end of the day, what the Commission expects is that a lot more youth who are the next generation, will understand and appreciate the importance of insurance and through that, it will also educate the uninformed public on the importance and the need for insurance to the individual, the family, and the nation as well. People are beginning to understand and appreciate insurance, but we think that penetration needs to increase more than what we are experiencing now. We think that looking at the initiative that the Commission has taken, it will get better,” Mr. Nsenkyire added.
Addressing the issue, the Director of the Ghana Insurance College, Richard Okyere, opined that there is a need for all stakeholders to pay attention to the sector insurance because it’s key to national development.
“With insurance worldwide, if you want to know a country’s advancement in terms of growth, insurance is very key. With insurance advancement, there would be a lot of opportunities. There would be a lot of advancement in the financial sector. So, with this training, claim management would be good. People will know when to claim and when not to claim, what type of policy to purchase to get a particular claim etc. These are some of the basic knowledge that participants will get”.
To champion this cause, the NIC has already trained four thousand five hundred out of the ten thousand youths it seeks to train including national service personnel. More so, the service persons are required to be on the road to inspect motor insurance as well as work alongside MTTD officers to reduce road traffic accidents.
The initiative will potentially help to create job opportunities for many graduates after their national service as some person would likely be retained as police officers, the National Service Secretariat remarked.
