Why is it that each time we have a crisis in Kenya, the majority of our informal workers are unable to sustain themselves for even a few days without an income?
Informal sector workers, who form nearly 85 percent of our workforce, are not eligible for a pension or any other social security safety net.
If their current behaviour and attitude towards savings remains unchanged, Kenya will witness an exponentially larger and more sustained social and fiscal crisis in the near future – once our informal workers are forced to permanently drop out of the workforce in their old age.
This is equally true for the nearly five million urban informal workers (casual workers, domestic helpers, boda boda, taxi drivers and street vendors) as it is for the more than 10 million other rural informal workers across Kenya.
Therefore, strategies used for collecting pension contributions from salaried employees with regular monthly pay cheques cannot be applied to construction workers, farmers, domestic help, street vendors or casual workers — all of whom have very unpredictable incomes.
