“Ejo Heza” Long-Term Saving Scheme

Before 2018, formal retirement saving arrangements in Rwanda were restricted to the barely 0.5 million salaried private and public sector workers who form less than 6 percent of the workforce. The remaining majority workforce, including those in the agricultural sector, as also workers in small and micro enterprises, daily wage earners, domestic help, self-employed professionals, and other informal sector non-salaried workers more generally were excluded from formal pension arrangements and hence faced a significant risk of outliving their savings.

One of the key strategic interventions to address this exclusion was the country’s medium-term transformation plan to operationalize a long-term savings scheme as a basis to increase domestic savings. Hence, in 2019 Access to Finance Rwanda supported the Government of Rwanda through the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (MINECOFIN) to established “Ejo Heza” Long Term Savings Scheme (LTSS) administered by the Rwanda Social Security Board as the Administrator. The scheme was established to ensure a dignified old age for workers in the informal sector previously excluded from the pension system and solve the problem of a huge pension and social security coverage gap where less than 8% of the Rwandan workforce were covered by formal pension and other social security arrangements.