Director-General of SSNIT, Dr John Ofori-Tenkorang stated that the introduction of the Ghana cards will make it easier to enroll people into the pension scheme as 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 this information or I say most of them has been provided to the National Identification Authority.”

“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 gonna card.  I swipe it and immediately I have all the information on you, Your telephone number, your email address if any. How old you are, your date of birth and all that stuff and if we need to add any additional information, it’ll be minimal information. And then 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.” He added.

Mr Tenkorang also highlighted efforts his outfit has made to make payments of contributions to SSNIT convenient for contributors.

The other thing that I think is gonna make it easy for us to make inroads is the mode of payment that we are going to roll out. One of them was 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 and we have come up with a back end platform that allows payments to be made through momo to integrate directly into our systems.

Recent data from the Ghana Statistical Service’s Population and Housing Census (PHC) indicates that 10.8 million of the population are workers, out of which just about 1.7 million workers are covered by SSNIT.

A situation many have expressed concern over while calling on authorities to put in the required effort to close the gap.