Faced with pensions time bomb, Kenya asks government workers to pay up

The government launched a contributory pension scheme for hundreds of thousands of government workers on Wednesday, to prevent a crisis in the government’s finances from growing retirement obligations.

Kenya, which is facing reduced tax revenue due to the coronavirus crisis and ballooning debt repayments, has been spending 2.9 per cent of its annual budget on pensions payments, the ministry of finance said, in a plan that does not involve contributions by individual workers.