The Director General of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT), Dr. John Ofori-Tenkorang, has revealed plans by the scheme to enroll some one million people in the informal sector onto SSNIT in 2023.

The director-general made the disclosure at the opening ceremony of a conference by the Operations and Benefits Division of SSNIT in the Eastern Regional Capital, Koforidua, on Wednesday, November 30, 2022.

"It is our hope that within the next year or two we should be able to get a million self-employed people signed on to SSNIT, and by so doing, they will be assured that they will receive monthly benefits till death," the director-general said.

SSNIT, according to Dr. Tenkorang, is already making significant progress in enrolling self-employed people in the scheme ahead of the campaign's launch in 2023.

This, he noted, is largely being facilitated through stakeholder engagement and sensitisation, as well as some innovations being pursued by SSNIT, including the introduction of an electronic payment platform.

"When we started this year, sensitising people on the need for the self-employed to join SSNIT, we had only about 14,000 who were self-employed and had voluntarily come to join SSNIT. But through the stakeholder engagement, while we were sensitising people, we got a significant uptake.

"Within three months that we have been doing the sensitization, we have jumped from 14,000 to 18,000, which is about a 30% increment within just three months, and we haven't even launched.

"Even though today, you can walk into any SSNIT office and register yourself as a self-employed person, we haven't gone out there to officially open the channels, and this 30% uptake was achieved even before we rolled out the electronic payment channels," he said.

Highlighting the importance of SSNIT to the Ghanaian economy, Dr. Tenkorang noted that as of October 2022, SSNIT had paid some GHC3.4 billion in pension payments for the year in review.

The payments, he said, also include survivor's benefits and one-time lump sum payments made to SNIT contributors.

Dr. John Ofori-Tenkorang further noted that SSNIT is working tirelessly to enroll the over 8 million working Ghanaians who are yet to register with the scheme.

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