Africa’s Pension Tech Gap: Why Retirement Savings Remain Largely Offline

Nigeria’s pension industry likes to talk in trillions these days. Assets under the Contributory Pension Scheme crossed N31 trillion in mid-2026, roughly $22.8 billion, after a 51 percent surge in just two years. It is a genuine milestone for a system that barely existed twenty years ago. But the number that matters more is the one sitting quietly beside it: just over 11 million Retirement Savings Accounts, in a country where the National Bureau of Statistics puts the informal workforce above 90 percent. Nigeria’s pension boom, in other words, is a formal-sector story. Everyone else is still saving for old age the way their parents did — in cash, in cooperatives, in land, or not at all.

That gap is not unique to Nigeria. It is the defining fact of retirement finance across the continent, and it is the reason “pension tech” has quietly become one of the more interesting corners of African fintech.

A System Built for the Few

Africa’s pension architecture was largely inherited from colonial-era civil service schemes, then extended piecemeal to formal private employment. The result is a two-tier system: contributory schemes that work reasonably well for salaried workers at registered companies, and almost nothing for everyone else.

The International Labour Organization estimates that only about 6 percent of the working-age population in sub-Saharan Africa contributes to a pension scheme, even though legal coverage on paper looks far broader. Informality is the reason. With roughly 85 percent of African employment sitting outside formal payroll structures, according to ILO figures cited by RisCura’s BrightAfrica research, the standard model of automatic payroll deduction simply has no one to deduct from.

Nigeria’s own experiment with reaching that population illustrates how hard the problem is. The Micro…