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Minister Launches Study On Pension
By Victor Karega, All Africa
3 July 2010
Tanzania
The government has admitted that it lacked appropriate infrastructure and modern technology for storage of essential particulars of the elderly persons in the country. Labour, Employment and Youth Development minister Prof Juma Kapuya said on Wednesday that modern technology was required for effective provision of social security services.
He said during the launching of a feasibility study on Universal Pension of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam that statistics indicated that 94.1 per cent of the country's labour force was serving in the informal sector. "Poor technology and the ever growing informal sector makes it hard for the government to expand the social security services," the minister said.
Slow recovery pace of the country's economy was also undermining the government's efforts to implement its social security plans, including provision of pensions and other social services to elderly persons from both, the formal and informal sectors, he said. Prof Kapuya further observed that lack of an authority to administer all social pension funds in the country was causing conflicts amongst social security funds.
Social security laws currently were biased, as they only served Tanzanians employed in the formal sector, leaving the majority of the citizens serving in the informal sector.
Owing to lack of strategies to incorporate the informal sector in the social security services, he said, hardly four per cent of the country's labour force was benefiting from the social security funds' services.
Professor Kapuya said the government was in collaboration with development partners conducting research on the possibility of broadening social services to as many Tanzanians as possible. The social security services currently available in the country, he added, ought to be revisited, as the services still did not cater for the elderly persons' basic needs in life. The government was liaising with donors on the possibility of issuing pensions to all four million elderly persons mostly living in the rural areas, he said.
An official involved in the implementation of the feasibility study Stephen Barret, said provision of pensions to all elderly persons would greatly contribute in the national poverty alleviation drive.
"The elderly persons and their families will actively participate in building the nation, as pensions would assist them in handling various risks facing them," he said.
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