Less than 1 percent of the over 6 million workers in the informal sector are covered by the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT).
This is significantly low compared to the 60 percent of the over 3 million workers in the formal sector who have enrolled in the scheme.
The Director-General of SSNIT, John Ofori Tenkorang, in an interview with the media, said the Trust has introduced the Self-Employed Enrollment Drive (SEED) to encourage informal sector enrollments.
“When we started last year, we only had about 14,000 people enrolled on the SSNIT scheme as self-employed but today, we have about 71,000 people enrolled on the scheme as self-employed persons. The statistics I gave to the committee, if you look at the February payroll, which we have just paid, out of some 245,000 pensioners that we paid, only 630, constituting 0.3 percent, are people who have retired as self-employed persons. If you juxtapose that against the total worker population, you will see that we have a long way to go.”