The Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT), administrator of Ghana’s Basic National Social Security Scheme, has stormed the streets of Wa, the Upper West Regional capital, to raise awareness of its Self-Employed Enrollment Drive (SEED) initiative.
The SEED initiative focuses on enrolling self-employed persons and workers in the informal sector on the SSNIT Scheme to contribute regularly on their full earnings.
To raise awareness about the initiative and court self-employed persons to enrol on the scheme, SSNIT undertook a route march through the principal streets of Wa, speaking to the public including shop owners, on Friday, August 30, 2024.
The route march, led by the Acting Corporate Affairs Manager of SSNIT, Mrs. Victoria Gifty Abaidoo together with personnel of the Trust, welding placards, was climaxed at the Wa Central Market.
Some of the placards read “Bring 13.5% of your income and get up to 60%,” “The only Pension Scheme that pays you as long as you live,” and “The only Pension Scheme that provides you with invalidity pension.”
Addressing the media, Mrs Abaidoo said the campaign dubbed “Operation-A-Thon” was a nationwide drive to reach out to more self-employed persons within the informal sector to join the Scheme and begin saving towards retirement.
She said SSNIT rolled out the SEED initiative because it cares for the welfare of every Ghanaian worker in the formal and informal sectors to ensure every worker has a befitting retirement or retired life.
“We are roping in the self-employed onto the SSNIT scheme just because we care for every worker in this country; that every worker, having worked so hard and retired, would have to retire on a good income.
“So we here hitting the streets of Wa, introducing ourselves as people who care for them, and roping in for them to have a better retirement when they have finished their working life,” Mrs Abaidoo said.
She noted that the SSNIT scheme was not just meant for only formal sector workers but every Ghanaian worker including the self-employed and thus, called on self-employed individuals to get enrolled on the scheme.
Mrs Abaidoo said SSNIT offers generous packages to people who contribute to the scheme and are retired, whether through mandatory or voluntary retirement or by invalidity pension.
She said “This pension is increased every year so that we do not lose the purchasing power of the pensioners’ money” and that “we [SSNIT] also pay survivors benefits” to relatives of deceased contributors.
After the walk through the streets of Wa and convergence at the Wa Central Market, Mrs. Abaidoo expressed happiness over the warm reception of SEED’s message by the public who were engaged through word-of-mouth talks and placard and handbill notices.
“They have welcomed us. We are very happy with the kind of interactions we had with them. They have really accepted us and we know, from today, they are going to enrol,” she remarked.
The SEED initiative was launched in May 2023 and according to the SSNIT records, it has successfully enrolled over 100,000 self-employed individuals into the Scheme – the figure, before the launch, hovered around 13,000.
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