The Social Security (Minimum Standards) Convention No.102 adopted by the International Labour Conference of the ILO on 28 June 1952 establishes worldwide-agreed minimum standards for all nine branches of social security to encourage the widest development of social security schemes. These branches are; medical care, sickness benefit, unemployment benefit, old-age benefit, employment injury benefit, family benefit, maternity benefit, invalidity benefit; and survivors benefits.

The rationale of a retirement benefits scheme is to alleviate old age poverty and a contributing factor to poverty is the loss of the principle bread winner. Despite paying survivors benefits, statistics indicate that up to 80 per cent of the said families have to downgrade their living standards and are susceptible to poverty. To address this challenge, the Laptrust scheme introduced additional insurance-based benefits; Group life cover (3 times annual pensionable salary) and last expense (USD 1,000) to complement existing survivor's benefits drawn from the scheme.

It has been recognized that a major challenge in developing countries is how to ensure that the poor are included in health financing arrangements and they can access benefit from health insurance coverage as the non-poor.

Financial institutions in Africa have successfully plugged into the mobile ecosystem and deployed services that have revolutionized service delivery, transforming customer engagement touch points and feedback mechanisms as well as enhancing responsiveness of the financial institutions. In addition to this mobile tech has enabled financial penetration. Currently Kenya has 68 per cent financial penetration through mobile tech and is at 80 per cent in use. While many Social Security services providers use mobile technology, they are still to fully leverage on its capabilities.

Records Management is a critical part of social security administration. The inherent risks in poor records management are not only limited to incorrect payments but often expose the scheme to fraud, loss of data/information, compromised data integrity, poor fund management leading to non-realization of return on investment, litigation, etc.

Prior to 2015, the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) was only offering Inpatient services to the members on a rebate system. This arrangement was still deficient in breadth for some crucial medical services required by its members, specifically, surgical care and specialized laboratory investigations. This meant that members were still incurring out-of-pocket expenditure to access advanced treatment.

Prior to August 2015, NHIF was only offering Inpatient services.  In order to meet the increasing customer demand for quality and enhanced benefits, NHIF embarked on conducting an Actuarial Study on the viability of enhancing the benefits & the cost implications for sustainability purposes. This paved way for the introduction of enhanced bundled benefits. These were;

1.        Outpatient Services

2.         Caesarean Section

The National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) has been focusing its efforts to recruit members from the informal sector in a bid to achieve Universal Health Coverage. Further, NHIF has also engaged strategic partners to cover the indigents. This meant that there was need for innovations to meet the needs of this target group. One area of concern was how NHIF would collect insurance premiums from members in the informal sector.

Summary