January 2026
30Jan

India. NPS drives pension expansion, but coverage remains limited amid informality: Economic Survey 2025-26

India’s pension system has expanded steadily over the past decade, but overall coverage remains limited when measured against the size of the country’s vast workforce, the Economic Survey 2025-26 has said. While participation in formal retirement savings schemes is rising, the Survey flags high informality, irregular incomes and low awareness as the biggest structural constraints preventing broad-based pension inclusion, especially among low-income and rural households. According to the Survey, the dominance of informal employment continues to shape the contours of...

January 30, 2026
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27Jan

UK. Pensions and financial inclusion: Time to join forces

Towards the end of last year, the government published its Financial Inclusion Strategy. This rightly focuses on building resilience through a range of measures, including banking access, savings, insurance, credit and debt support. These are bolstered by proposals for compulsory financial education in primary schools. However, pensions are noticeably absent from the core framework. This is despite the fact that pensions form the cornerstone of long-term financial security. On the one hand, this separation makes sense, as the revived Pensions Commission and...

January 27, 2026
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22Jan

Nigeria. ‘Only 215,914 informal workers enrolled in personal pensions as 92m remain uncovered’

The National Pension Commission (PenCom) has disclosed that just 215,914 Nigerians in the informal sector are enrolled in the Personal Pension Plan (PPP), leaving about 91.88 million workers without any form of pension cover out of an estimated 92.1 million informal-sector workforce. The pension regulator, in its third-quarter 2025 report, said the figures highlight the enormous untapped potential within the informal sector and underscore the need for a more deliberate and coordinated industry-wide strategy to deepen micro-pension adoption. PenCom noted that...

January 22, 2026
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12Jan

Nigeria. Driving growth with recapitalisation

With macroeconomic headwinds still blowing, regulatory shakeups underway, and citizens demanding more value for their trust, Omobola Tolu-Kusimo writes on whether 2026 could be the year these industries either break new ground or stay stuck in the cycle of unrealized potential. The year 2025 ended with increased premiums, improved regulatory oversight, and renewed investor interest following NAICOM’s enforcement of the Nigerian Insurance Industry Reform Act, 2025 (NIIRA 2025).reforms and recapitalisation efforts. However, insurance penetration remains below 1per cent, a stubborn reminder...

January 12, 2026
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09Jan

When digital platforms enter informal sectors: work formalization and institutional change

By Isam Faik, Michelle Gwee, Felix Ter Chain Tan, Carmen Leong & Fithra Faisal Hastiadi Digital platforms are undermining long-standing formal institutions for the organization of work. However, when they enter informal sectors, they contribute to the opposite effect by increasing the formalization of work activities. In this study, we investigate this hitherto unexamined phenomenon by drawing on a case study of Gojek, one of the largest digital platforms in Southeast Asia. We identify three main mechanisms through which the...

January 9, 2026
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08Jan

The gig economy is not the future of work — it’s a warning

By Quah Boon Huat   This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on January 5, 2026 - January 11, 2026 Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old ride-hailing driver and his family’s breadwinner, should have been invisible to power. On Aug 28 last year, an armoured police vehicle crushed him as it chased protesters. The video of his death seared Indonesia. Affan was not a protester. He was working — delivering food, saving for a home, keeping his family afloat. His killing ripped through Indonesia,...

January 8, 2026
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December 2025
05Dec

Exploring the awareness, preparedness and the state of pension among informal workers in Ghana

By Moses Segbenya, Jennifer Onomah, Raymond Kangmennaang & Esther Grantson The study explored the awareness, preparedness, and the state of pensions among informal workers in Ghana. The interpretive approach and the exploratory research design were used for this study. The snowball and purposive sampling techniques were adopted to select 45 informal workers in Ghana and two management members of a pension scheme in Ghana. Data gathered was transcribed, coded and analysed with the qualitative interpretative analytical framework. The study found that the majority of...

December 5, 2025
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05Dec

Nigeria to extend social protections to 60 million in the informal sector

The minister made this disclosure in Abuja during a two-day national dialogue on expanding social protection to informal workers. He said the Federal Government is taking concrete steps to address decades of exclusion affecting millions of Nigerians who earn a living in markets, farms, workshops, roadside enterprises and other informal settings. “Today, we write a new chapter in our collective journey to give dignity, inclusion, and protection to the over 60 million Nigerians who make up our informal economy,” the minister...

December 5, 2025
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02Dec

India. How Atal Pension Yojana is helping women claim long-term pension security

For millions of women who have spent lifetimes in unpaid labour or informal work, the idea of a guaranteed pension was once unimaginable. Today, they form 48% of all Atal Pension Yojana (APY) subscribers in India, reshaping a scheme designed for the country’s most vulnerable workers, according to a Lok Sabha reply on the scheme dated December 1. Launched by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) in 2015, Atal Pension Yojana is a government-backed pension scheme aimed primarily...

December 2, 2025
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November 2025
13Nov

Precarious, Poorly Paid, and Unprotected: The ILO’s Definition of the Informal Economy

The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines informal employment as work “in small or unregistered businesses and undeclared jobs within registered firms,” under a definition adopted by the 17th International Conference of Labour Statisticians in 2013. While such jobs often provide quick income and greater flexibility, they are usually unstable, poorly paid, and lack basic protections such as health insurance or pensions. The ILO notes that informal employment is not limited to unregistered businesses. It can also occur within formal companies when...

November 13, 2025
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