Peoples Pension Trust (PPT), a licensed Corporate Trustee in Ghana and Swiss Capacity Building Facility (SCBF), a public-private development platform, has launched a new programme; Scaling Gender-Focused Financial Resilience (SGFR).
SGFR will support informal, 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.
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 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.
The Chief Executive Officer of SCBF, Sitara Merchant, who launched the programme last week to mark this year’s International Women’s Day, said “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.”
She said the SGFR Programme “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.”
Ms Merchant said it was 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 Extending Pension Coverage to the Informal Sector in Africa report, the CEO said one of the challenges in designing an informal sector pension scheme was reaching geographically dispersed people.
The CEO of PPT, SaqibNazir, said “Our business model is based on addressing the main factors for their 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.”
He said partnership with SBCF would allow PPT to better reach women through the development of gender-focused technology solutions and partnerships that support this year’s Women’s International Day theme to ‘Break the Bias’ with a more inclusive approach to reaching women; from a positioning and financial literacy perspective.”
BY TIMES REPORTER