When migrant workers in the East African Community reach retirement age, most return to their home countries without a pension. This may change with the draft EAC Common Market (Coordination of Social Security Rights and Benefits) Regulations 2023.

One might quibble that it's been long overdue, but it formalises what member states had already agreed to in the 2010 Common Market Protocol to ensure that the migrants have the same rights as those accorded to workers in the host Partner State.

What remains is for the countries to validate and adopt the guidelines, a process that appears to have still been ongoing two years ago.

While each member state has labour legislation governing the employment of foreigners on its territory, most of them are silent about the migrant workers’ pensions. Some are accommodative while others do not seem quite so friendly.

Nothing demonstrates the disharmony better than the concerns already expressed by professionals, who fear losing staff benefits should they choose to work in a different country—a situation already decried as slowing free movement labour in EAC.

Public and private employers in the region often do not have provisions for cross-border pension portability, the ability of workers to retain their retirement benefits when they change jobs.

Something similar was noted at the East African Business Council roundtable in Arusha a couple of weeks ago.

But adoption of the 2023 social security regulations is expected to ensure workers within the bloc have equitable access to pension benefits, regardless of their nationality and country of residence.

The novelty of the retirement policy is that it will be inclusive of the workers in the informal sector—the Jua Kali sector, to borrow the symbolic and popular Kenyan term that aptly describes those who toil unprotected under the hot sun (jua kali in Swahili).

Still, one cannot view this without an appreciation of the situation as it currently obtains for the nationals, let alone the migrants.

While it is now almost cliché to speak of the breakdown of the traditional families that assured retired elders of social protection, it remains the fate of the Jua Kali workers since the colonial times to never have had the benefit of a pension scheme.

Legal frameworks in EAC and across Africa still favour the formal sector, although some elderly retirees from the informal sector benefit from some form of cash transfer programs in countries such as Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya. The programs do not universally reach all the needy older persons.

Those from the formal sector gain from any of national mandatory pension schemes, work-based retirement schemes or individual retirement savings plans.

But overall, Africa spends less than 5 per cent of GDP on social protection compared to the global average of 12.9 per cent.

Much of the spending goes to those in the formal sector, the tragedy therefore being the huge number of the continent's Jua Kali workers seemingly left to their own.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), 83 per cent of employment in Africa and 85 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa is informal. The Organisation, however, also notes that just 8.9 per cent of those in employment are covered by pension schemes in sub-Saharan Africa, including in the EAC.

In more concrete human terms, the figure tells us that for every ten people in the region with a job, formal or informal, nine of them likely retire into poverty.

The need for a policy in the continent such as in the EAC Social Security Rights and Benefits Regulations could never be so stark.

Note also that youth in Africa constitute 70 per cent of the population, and that the vast majority of those who reach employment age are absorbed in the informal sector. This means that unless something is done now to put something away for their old age, they too will inevitably follow their parents retiring into needless poverty.

In this reality the migrants find themselves, mirroring the situation in their own countries as in those they migrate to work.

One of the major challenges of the EAC social security regulations will be how to persuade the nine out of ten who do not save for retirement only to often retire into poverty.

And with the majority of the workers being in the informal sector and usually difficult to target for tax let alone pension, it calls for creative solutions as much as it does political will.

Political will is worth mentioning. We are yet to hear from the member states how far they have gone, if at all, in validating the 2023 regulations, noting also that almost none of them has yet to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers.

X: @gituram