The Sunday Mail
Tawanda Musarurwa
The complicated mix of a skewed institutional social security arrangement and high levels of economic informalisation has compromised the social protection of millions of Zimbabweans.
Zimbabwe’s informal economy has grown rapidly over the past couple of decades as the expansion of formal employment has faced significant obstacles.
Social protection consists of policies and programmes structured to reduce poverty and vulnerability by promoting efficient labour markets, diminishing people’s exposure to risks and enhancing their capacity to protect themselves against interruption or loss of income.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) Social Security (Minimum Standards) Convention, 1952 (No. 102), outlines the nine principal branches of social security – namely medical care, sickness, unemployment, old age, employment injury, family, maternity, invalidity and survivors’ benefits.
In Zimbabwe, the National Social Security Authority (NSSA), constituted and established in terms of the NSSA Act of 1989, Chapter 17: 04, is the statutory corporate body tasked by the Government to provide social security.
But the body currently only covers four of the indicated principal branches of social security.
According to NSSA acting chief social security officer Shepherd Muperi, the informal sector is one of the branches that the authority does not cover, a situation that has resulted in the majority of working-age Zimbabweans operating without the requisite social safety nets.
“The current coverage of only four branches of social security means that Zimbabwe still has to cover the remaining five branches in order to attain the ILO minimum standards.
“Moreover, the existence of a huge informal sector, which is not covered by social security, means that the country is still very far away from attaining these minimum standards,” said Mr Muperi.
“Without social security cover, workers in the informal sector are vulnerable to poverty in the event of life contingencies like old age, death, sickness, access to health care, employment injury, unemployment and invalidity. Extension of social security coverage is inevitable.
“Given that social security schemes are important tools for fighting poverty, informal sector workers, who constitute 94,5 percent of the country’s labour force (Zimstat, 2015), are in dire need of social security cover.”
To the extent that NSSA does not presently cover the informal sector, the majority of Zimbabwe’s working population is not shielded by labour market policies and programmes designed to promote employment, the efficient operation of labour markets and the protection of workers.
And neither are they sheltered by NSSA’s social insurance programmes that are meant to cushion the risks associated with unemployment, ill health, disability, work-related injury and old age.
There is nothing really sinister about NSSA currently covering only four of the nine branches of social protection because the ILO convention mentioned above also makes countries eligible for ratification for accepting at least three of its nine branches, including subsequently accepting obligations under other branches.
But then the countries should progressively attain all the objectives set out in the convention.
To this extent, NSSA is in the process of developing a scheme that will cater for the country’s sprawling informal sector.
“In response to the coverage gap, NSSA is working on developing a social security scheme for workers in the informal sector,” said Mr Muperi.
Implementing a national social protection programme is certainly more complicated than one for the formal sector due to the very disparate entities and knotty configuration of an informal economy.
Last year, NSSA general manager Emerson Mungwariri said the authority had received significant stakeholder feedback for the proposed programme.
“The authority conducted extensive stakeholder consultations across the country throughout the second half of 2017, into early 2018. Useful feedback was gathered during the consultations, which has made it necessary for NSSA to revisit the design of the scheme in order to align it to the specific needs and expectations of the targeted beneficiaries,” he said.
“The design of the scheme is spearheaded by the authority’s actuaries, after which the redesigned product will be taken to the market.”
The concept is, however, not a novel one. Zimbabwe can draw lessons from other Africa countries that has developed social protection schemes for their informal workers.
In a note for the International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, social protection and gender specialist Flora Myamba writes:
“Over the last decade, there have been increasing efforts to extend social insurance coverage beyond workers in the formal sector. Examples include the Mbao Pension for informal workers in Kenya, and social protection initiatives for workers in the informal and rural economy (SPIREWORK) — including one in Zambia, with the support of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Government of Finland, and a similar initiative also supported by the Government of Finland in Tanzania. Moreover, in the case of Tanzania, over the past five years all contributory pension schemes have been extended to cover informal workers through voluntary contributions.”
