All-Covered Pension Programme: Mo-Ne-Yo’s pledge for real change

By Isaac Frimpong (PhD)

Imagine Maame Akosua at Suame. She sells kenkey three evenings a week, supports two children, and saves small amounts with a susu collector. She wants a secure income in old age and hopes her adult children can help one day. But the idea of “registering” with yet another private or government institution makes her uneasy. She fears it will mean new taxes, additional paperwork she cannot manage, or, worse, losing access to her own funds when she needs them. That hesitation is precisely where many good pension initiatives fall through the cracks.

Ghana’s informal economy is huge and diverse. It employs more than seven in ten of the workforce. Most of these workers earn irregular and volatile incomes and rely on trust-based savings systems such as susu. Market traders, artisans, drivers, farmers, and street vendors keep markets vibrant, link producers to consumers, and keep towns moving. Yet most of these workers have no formal pension coverage or state-backed income in old age. Even traditional family and community support systems, which once served as a primary form of social security, are weakening due to migration, urbanisation, changing family dynamics, and prolonged economic pressures, leaving many informal workers vulnerable to old-age poverty.

The Mo-Ne-Yo Promise

This is why the NDC’s Mo-Ne-Yo initiative has traction. It speaks to millions of Ghanaians who have long felt excluded from retirement systems designed for formal economy employees. The manifesto explicitly targets drivers, okada riders, market women, creative artisans, and other informal workers with a special pension under the “All-Covered Pension Programme.” It is an attractive and timely ambition.

But what often gets lost in political manifestos, now framed as a contract with the people, is the practical question of take-up. Announcing an informal pension scheme is easy. Getting people like Maame Akosua to contribute regularly is much harder.

Formalisation Alone Will Not Do It

Formalisation is often presented as the solution. It involves bringing businesses and workers under legal recognition through registration, record-keeping, and compliance with tax and labour rules. When it works, it can improve access to credit, regularise contributions, and more easily link workers to formal social protection systems.

But this is not a short-term fix. With population growth outpacing infrastructure and job creation, and youth unemployment rising, formalising the informal economy will take decades. It will not deliver pension coverage to the majority anytime soon.

Meanwhile, voluntary pension schemes already exist. SSNIT’s Self-Employment Enrolment Drive (SEED) seeks to extend pension coverage to self-employed workers. Tier-3 voluntary pensions, managed by private trustees, are also open to both formal and informal workers. These schemes are valuable, but take-up has been limited. Mo-Ne-Yo should not compete with SEED or Tier-3. It should focus on bringing people in, after which SEED and Tier-3 can do what they already do best: manage pension savings over the long term.

Why Does Take-up Break Down?

Policymakers understand the targeting process: define the social problem, identify resources, choose a targeting method, then register and deliver. In practice, Ghana struggles at the final two stages because they collide with everyday realities in the informal economy.

Targeting mechanisms often assume stable incomes, fixed addresses, clear occupational identities, and a willingness to engage formal institutions. Informal workers seldom fit these assumptions. Many move between trades, earn irregular incomes, and operate outside fixed locations. Registration processes, however well-intentioned, can feel intrusive, time-consuming, or risky, especially in contexts where taxation and enforcement are closely linked to government databases.

Delivery systems also rely heavily on individual compliance and long-term trust. Yet trust in public institutions remains weak, and pension benefits are still distant, even as contributors must sacrifice today. Without immediate, tangible value, flexible entry points, and trusted intermediaries, many informal workers rationally choose to stay out. As a result, pension schemes are well designed on paper but fail to translate into sustained participation in practice.

What Does This Mean For Mo-Ne-Yo?

If Mo-Ne-Yo follows the familiar pattern: announce, ask people to register, then wait, it risks falling short of its coverage goals. The risk is that it becomes another slogan rather than a system that expands pension coverage.

To work, Mo-Ne-Yo must be built around how people already save and who they already trust. Ghana’s traditions of reciprocity, shared exchange, and collective responsibility remain strong. Community savings groups, drivers’ unions, market associations, and mobile money platforms are part of daily life. Aligning with these realities can reduce duplication and build credibility.

Conclusion

As Mo-Ne-Yo moves from manifesto promise to policy design, the focus should be clear. It should shift away from registration as the starting point and towards meeting informal workers where they already are. It should also prioritise connecting existing schemes rather than creating parallel structures that add complexity without increasing coverage.

In my next article, I will outline a practical, step-by-step implementation pathway for Mo-Ne-Yo that avoids the registration trap, improves take-up, and works with, not against, SEED and Tier-3 options. If the goal is a pension programme that delivers durable coverage rather than a short-term fix, a clear roadmap is essential at this stage.

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