Micro Pension Inclusion: Awabah partners Stanbic IBTC Pension Managers

Awabah, Nigeria’s first digital micro pension platform, has formed a strategic alliance with Stanbic IBTC Pension Managers to deepen micro pension inclusion across Nigeria.

The announcement, made via Awabah’s social media handles, showed how excited the PensionTech startup was about joining forces with a leading Pension Fund Administrator (PFA) in the country.

Speaking on the partnership, Tunji Andrews, Co-Founder, and CEO of Awabah said that this partnership has raised the stakes for Awabah as the company is set to onboard 150,000 new users in the next 12 months and is targeting 5 million customers by 2026.

He said, “The goal is to have 5 million micro pension accounts with active contributions made via Awabah’s platforms by the time it turns 5”.

He went on to say that although funding retirement savings accounts was quite a task, Awabah was ready to do the hard work, and had put strategies in place to achieve this goal. One such strategy is the creation of agent networks to onboard new users, and another is leveraging trade shows to drive awareness.

19 PFAs registered 2,166 contributors during the fourth quarter of 2021. This brought the total number of Micro Pension contributors to 73,600.

According to information from the National Pension Commission, similarly, the sum of N25,094,874.26 was credited into the RSAs of 8,260 MPP Contributors in Q4 2021, bringing the total value of the Micro Pension Fund to N224,054,870.69 as at end of the quarter under review. While these figures are small compared to the size of the market, with dedicated initiatives like those provided by Awabah in partnership with PFAs, it is expected that more informal workers will be enrolled into the scheme.