The National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) has been experiencing a number of operational challenges including some attempts by non-contributing members to access health care services by using invalid membership cards.

According to the rules and procedures, members who are not contributing to the Fund for past three consecutive months, are not eligible to access medical services provided by the Fund. However, since around 95 per cent of contributing members of the NHIF are drawn out of the public sector, enforcement of this requirement has been a big challenge.

Since the reorganization of the Pension Fund of Morocco (Caisse marocaine des retraites – CMR) in 2011, which placed the client at the forefront of its concerns, the Fund’s “client relationship” has changed considerably, in particular owing to the introduction and use of a marketing and multichannel approach.

In 2016, the CMR witnessed:

Prior to the introduction of the Collective Scheme for Retirement Allowances (Régime collectif d’allocation de retraite – RCAR) in 1978 and in the absence of a statutory retirement scheme to cover them, several public establishments in Morocco managed their own retirement funds (special schemes, railway workers, mining personnel, water and electricity managers). This however suffered from the following limitations and drawbacks:

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.

Internal staff training courses organized by the National Social Insurance Fund (Caisse nationale de prévoyance sociale – CNPS) were centralized in Yaoundé, with some deployment at the level of the four regional headquarters. This compelled staff from external services to travel long distances and stay away from their duty stations and homes for several days or even weeks to attend these training courses. This model generated enormous costs for the organization in terms of travel, accommodation and subsistence.

A voluntary insurance scheme for independent workers and workers from the informal sector was established in 2014, in line with regulations. In an effort to make this scheme known to all concerned sectors of the population and to facilitate the enrolment of the greatest possible number, the National Social Insurance Fund (Caisse nationale de prévoyance sociale – CNPS) developed a system involving the accreditation of social secretariats.

Employers are required to register as enterprises and to register their staff, then pay the corresponding social security contributions. When the employer does not do this, the employees may do it themselves. What has been found in practice is that many employers either do not register themselves or their staff, as a result of which the latter cannot access the social security benefits provided by the National Social Insurance Fund (Caisse nationale de prévoyance sociale – CNPS).

The Collective Scheme for Retirement Allowances (Régime collectif d’allocation de retraite – RCAR) has introduced a fully computerized and versatile multi-scheme, multiproduct organizational and technological management platform, consisting of a multi-channel Customer Relations Centre (agencies, a call centre, web/mobile, social networks), a multiproduct Payment Centre, and a computerized Back Office that is integrated with RCAR’s partners.

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.

Before August 2015 more than 3 million pensioners of the Mexican Social Security Institute (Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social – IMSS) had to visit its offices at least twice a year to confirm their survival to continue receiving pension payments.