People’s Pension Trust (here after: PPT) provides pension products mainly for informal sector workers in Ghana. While these workers comprise approximately 85% of the population, informal sector workers are traditionally not well protected by the Ghana social security system and therefore face higher risk of old-age poverty. PPT is one of the few private companies who is dealing with pension schemes for informal sector workers. Customers who sign up to PPT get access to an online savings account as well as an online retirement account. Hereby, PPT provides an opportunity for a huge customer segment to save for the future and to eventually decrease the income gap in the country. In addition to the personal pension schemes for the informal sector, PPT also offers a mandatory corporate pension scheme for formal sector employees and a provident fund scheme (employer-employee funded) that provides employees with an additional retirement lump sum. All these products/ services are provided by means of a digital payment platform.
To make this happen, PPT is collaborating with several banks to facilitate the payments.  Furthermore, PPT is exploring partnerships with companies who can give out loans to their informal sector workers, to further support financial inclusion. Moreover, PPT is working together with community-based organizations to bring informal workers together and to educate them about the importance of saving. PPT has also partnered with several investors that are supporting the aims of the company. And finally, the government can also be considered as an important partner, as they are the regulators of the financial sector in Ghana.
In order to achieve the ultimate goal of financial inclusion, several challenges must be addressed. First of all, there is a lack of trust from the Ghanian population towards digital payment options as a result of historical incidents of fraud by financial institutions. Secondly, even if people trust the organization as well as the process, people do not always understand how to use online platforms. Thirdly, there is low awareness about the importance to save money for the future. All these issues are being worked on by PPT by means of education through a program called the ‘Pension Clinic’, to eventually reach the goal of financial inclusion for informal sector workers.
Read more about People’s Pension Trust here.
5-Step-to-scale approach
In order to effectively scale People’s Pension Trust (PPT) collaboratively, we organized a workshop using 5-step-to-scale framework with the participation of PPT and their partners. The outcome of the workshop is presented as below.
Step 1: Ambition
In this step, People’s Pension Trust and their partners answered the following seven simple questions to demarcate what value they and their partners seek to create for the BoP. First, they answered the questions individually. Then they discussed each other’s answers to reach a single, shared scaling ambition. Finally, PPT defined the following scaling impact ambition with their partners.
Step 2: Discovery
Understand the actors, resources, activities: In this step, People’s Pension Trust and their partners visualized the collaborators in the ecosystem (commonly called actors), their interactions and relationships with other collaborators, and the value created, delivered and captured through the collaboration for the BoP. The ecosystem for PPT can be visualized as below.
Understand the actors’ capabilities: People’s Pension Trust and their partners listed out the business’s opportunities, and threat.
Step 3: Strategy
In this step, People’s Pension Trust and their partners discovered potential scaling tactics by brainstorming ideas for each category. This results in about three most interesting ideas for each category.
Step 4: Adaptation
In this step, People’s Pension Trust and their partners identified and visualized the actors, resources and activities as well as the relationships between them that are necessary to realize the most interesting scaling tactics from Step 3. They developed 3 different strategies (strategy 2, 5 and 6 in the workshop).Â
Strategy 2:
Strategy 5:
Strategy 6:
Step 5: Evaluation
In this step, People’s Pension Trust and their partners used a simple attractiveness feasibility matrix to evaluate the scaling tactics. They scored each of the most interesting scaling tactics from step 3 based on their attractiveness and feasibly on a scale from high to low.
