The Director-General, National Pension Commission (PenCom) Omolola Oloworaran said the Commission is targeting a million self-employed women to enable them secure their financial future through the registration of the Personal Pension Plan (PPP).
Oloworaran disclosed this at the International Women’s Day 2026 outreach in Abuja, with the aim of encouraging women, especially self-employed women, to secure their financial future through the PPP, noting that the target of one million women a year might be a bit of a high target given where the country is right now, but the commission wants to keep up this drive to penetrate the informal sector.
She said: “Women play a very strong role not just in the family, but in society at large. The majority of workers in the informal sector are women and the majority of workers in the formal sector are men. So it is important for us if we want to empower women to save towards their financial security in old age,
“It is important we introduce this at the informal level and where better to start than in the market area. Most of these women wake up early, they do a lot of work, they fend for their families, and they do all sorts of things just to keep the home and the society together. So it’s important we begin to think about their financial security in old age and that’s what we are doing today.
“This is a large workforce; the informal sector workforce in itself is over 77 million. So we should be able to get one million women in a year, the number of people registering, amounts being contributed is what we will rely on including the reports our system tracks through information received from the PFA system.”
She added that the monitoring will be on a daily basis to see how close the commission is to the target of one million women this year; in the case of eventualities the next of kin should be aware of your savings, so in the registration there is space for next of kin.
She spoke on the matching fund where PenCom doubles any amount the women deposits, but the addition is not more than N20,000. “If an account is opened with twenty thousand, PenCom will match the funds with another N20,000, it is like this because PenCom is the regulator, they are working with the PFAs, the industries itself and some donors to make this a success,” she said.
