The Fund remains committed to being a responsible corporate citizen through its routine CSR activities whilst directing its focus to developing more sustainable solutions that positively impact its members, stakeholders, and society in order to secure lasting long-term success.
Our purpose of making lives better propels us to create sustained value for our members, stakeholders, and society so as to secure our long-term success. The Fund, through its corporate social responsibility (CSR) undertakes initiatives that provide positive social, environmental, and economic value to society.
Whereas these CSR activities demonstrate our commitment to being responsible corporate citizens, they are mainly one-off events in a year and may not create sustained trackable value over time.
Therefore, beyond CSR, the Fund has sought ways to engage in more sustainable initiatives and solutions to create lasting value to its members, stakeholders, and society. The major initiatives and programmes being undertaken are as follows.
The Financial Literacy Programme
This programme commenced in 2019 on the back of a 2018 internal survey which revealed that 80% of NSSF beneficiaries use their entire savings after only 2 years. Therefore, the initiative is aimed at empowering members and sections of the public with financial and investment knowledge to enable them make informed financial decisions. Refer to the Head of Operations’ statement for more information.
Hi-innovator programme
This is an initiative aimed at supporting youth, small and medium sized businesses to sustainably grow through entrepreneurship education, funding, and technical support. The Fund is undertaking this initiative in partnership with the Master Card Foundation. A USD 10m five-year fund was created to provide seed capital to qualifying entrepreneurs. The intention is to Fund 100 startups for the next 5 years. This will not only increase the Fund’s membership base but also contribute to economic growth through widening the tax base, creation of employment opportunities and in turn making lives better. Refer to DMD's statement for more information.
Staff innovation challenge
Connected to innovation, the Fund undertook an internal innovations challenge and selected two winning projects that are still under development. These include:
Yollo-Save
This a savings product centered round peoples’ spending behaviour. The solution enables one to save as they spend. It is currently at the customer experimentation stage and once fully rolled out, it will enable users to make savings on their expenditure and improve the saving culture.
Agro-Desk
This is an initiative aimed at bringing the Agri-business sector players, especially the farmers, onto the social security coverage spectrum. This initiative is still under development and once successfully concluded will make the lives of farmers better by enabling them to save for their retirement amidst their seasonal and cyclical earning structure.
Shared value from internally generated capacity
The Fund has overtime created incredible internal capacity evidenced by the sustained remarkable performance and has exported this success to society, companies, and the spaces that its professionals occupy. Key initiatives to highlight are as follows: