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The Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) in less than a year has enrolled about 121,000 informal sector workers onto the scheme under the Self-Employed and Enrollment Drive (SEED) initiative.
The SEED initiative was launched in May last year to extend pension coverage to the self-employed persons and workers in the informal sector.
It formed part of the Trust’s efforts to ensure that every worker in the country, especially the self-employed receives social security protection.
Speaking at the 2024 Second Half-Year SEED Activation Ops-A-Thon on Friday, the Director General of SSNIT, Kofi Osafo-Maafo, said the SEED programme, which started with only 13,000 informal sector workers last year, had recorded significant growth and had brought in about GH¢61 million revenue to the Trust.
As part of the programme, staff of SSNIT from the Greater Accra Region embarked on a walk on the Spintex Road in order to educate the public and create awareness on the SEED initiative.
The Accra programme was the lag leg of the SEED Ops-A-Thon which has been held in Wa, Techiman, Tarkwa, Koforidua, Obuasi and Somanya.
The Director General of SSNIT said the “SEED programme was going very well” and the response from the informal sector workers and the self-employed had been great.
He sated that SSNIT was working to enroll informal sector and the self-employed workers onto the scheme and also change the perception among the informal sector workers that the SSNIT scheme was meant for formal sector workers as well as educated them that the SSNIT
scheme offered the best pension proposition.
“SSNIT offers the best pension scheme in the country,” he noted, adding that “inbuilt within the SSNIT pension scheme is life insurance, invalidity benefits and indeed the pension benefit itself, which is based on a defined benefit scheme.”
“What this essentially means is that from day one or at any time, you can determine what your
benefits would be. Now, that is far superior to any other scheme and that is the central message,” Mr Osafo-Maafo explained.
Moreover, he underlined that the self-employed workers constitute the larger portion of the working population and were a critical part of the workforce in the country, emphasising that they would remain a “critical part of what we want to do going forward.”
“If you look at the pool of informal sector workers, there is a lot more to go. So we are certainly not stopping here. The informal sector workforce is going to become a critical and growing part of the SSNIT business,” Mr Osafo-Maafo stated.
The Director General of SSNIT outlined that the Trust had opened a new branch on the Spintex Road to bring the services of Trust to doorstep of workers.
