Press Release | Scaling Gender-Focused Financial Resilience (SGFR)

March 8, 2022 International Women’s Day — The Swiss Capacity Building Facility (SCBF) a public-private development platform, and its partner, the Peoples Pension Trust (PPT), a licensed Corporate Trustee in Ghana that offers innovative, flexible and digitally-driven pension products, announce a new program today, Scaling Gender-Focused Financial Resilience (SGFR). SGFR will support informal, marginalized, and excluded female workers and entrepreneurs to secure their future through micro-pensions.

Globally 1.8 billion people are working in the informal sector, and in Ghana, this represents approximately 80% of the population. Ghana’s informal sector workforce is predominately women, accounting for 54.9%. 

This new program will catalyse participation in pensions that will allow women to contribute small payments for long-term savings, and have access to 50% of their contributions for immediate needs if necessary. 

The Program will reach 100,000 new customers, with 60% 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.

“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. The SGFR Program fully aligns 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.”

Sitara Merchant, Chief Executive Officer, SCBF

In the next 40 years, the share of Ghanaians over 60 years old will double from 7% to 15%. As the World Bank reported (2019 Extending Pension Coverage to the Informal Sector in Africa), “One of the challenges in designing an informal sector pension scheme is reaching geographically dispersed.” 

“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. This partnership with SBCF will 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 #BreaktheBias with a more inclusive approach to reaching women; from a positioning and financial literacy perspective.”   

Saqib Nazir, CEO People’s Pension Trust

About Swiss Capacity Building Facility (SCBF)

SCBF is a public-private development partnership (PPDP) that funds technical assistance (TA) for financial service providers to develop and upscale client-centred financial products, channels and services in developing and emerging countries. The financial products and services include savings, loans, insurance, digital financial services, or financial education, among others.

Since its inception in 2011, SCBF has funded over 160 projects across 47 countries with the support of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). SCBF is dedicated to promoting responsible, inclusive finance to meet the needs of low-income people, smallholder farmers and small-scale entrepreneurs, in particular women, to improve their livelihoods and to raise them out of poverty.

About People’s Pension Trust (PPT)

PPT is a pension provider that offers innovative, flexible and digitally driven financial services to successfully increase resilience within the informal economy and reduce old-age poverty. PPT currently has more than 50,000 customers who save regularly towards their pensions.

People’s Pension Trust is licensed by the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA), Ghana.