WorldStage– To integrate Nigeria’s informal sector into the national retirement financial market, pension and insurance industries players must embark on a literacy campaign across the nation.
Muda Yusuf, the keynote speaker at the Inspen Online Retirement Summit 2026 in Lagos, said this May 20 while delivering his speech on Meeting Retirement Dreams of Informal Sector Workers with Insurance and Pension Instruments.
According to him, the sector accounts for 92 percent to 93 percent of the workforce driving Nigeria’s economy yet the government indirectly regards them as unorganized by referring to the other sector as the organized private sector.
As a result, Yusuf said government policies, insurance and pension products misalign with the realities of the informal sector players.
“The biggest issue in the insurance and pension markets now is trust, he said. “How can the informal sector trust people they don’t know or understand the language they speak?”
This lack of distrust coupled with the macro-economic situations often makes the informal sector uninterested in insurance or pension matters.
“There is a need for national retirement literacy campaign that will bring together all the groups and stakeholder and create awareness about retirement<” Yusuf said.
He noted many of them still consider retirement a curse associated with fear and poverty because of the experience of retirees from civil service. This is in spite of the reforms in the pension management and the insurance industry.
Just like their counterparts in civil service who keep seeking extension of the retirement age, the informal sectors workers also prepare to keep working for as long as they can. The speaker identified weakening family support systems and poor government social protection net as responsible for that.
And for the insurance firms and pension administrators to tap into this market, Yusuf said capital bases will not be as important as the abilities of the industry players to embed themselves into the daily realities of the informal sector, and design products and policy that align with its behaviors.
Most of the panelists that intervened in the discussion agreed there are still gaps between what the industries and government are doing, and how the informal sector perceives these.
Femi Egbesola, one of the panelists, said the technical language and the impersonal communication the pension and the insurance industries adopt in reaching the informal sector reinforce the trust problem.
Others also emphasized the need for awareness at the grassroots level.
The summit drew participants from the public and private sectors involved in insurance and pension finance.
Represented were the NAICOM Commissioner Olusegun Omosehin, D-G National Pension Commission Omolola Oloworaran, and others.
The organizer, Inspen Online, published by Chuks Udo Okonta, is a media platform focusing on the insurance and pension industry in Nigeria
