By Shruti Menon Seeboo
In the packed conference rooms of the 7th Annual Africa Pension Funds and Retirement Summit 2026 in Mauritius, one question echoed with particular urgency: who is the pension fund actually built for? For Timothy Mukoba, Co-Founder and COO of Systech Limited, Kenya, the answer has long been clear — yet chronically overlooked. Presenting to an audience of trustees, administrators, and fund managers, Mukoba issued a direct challenge to the industry: a pension fund that is fully compliant but fails its members is not a success. It is a structural failure wearing a certificate.
Mukoba opened his address by identifying the three foundational pillars of any pension scheme. Trustees, he argued, are the custodians of trust and legitimacy. Management — encompassing administrators, custodians, fund managers, and auditors — are the custodians of execution and operational continuity. But the third pillar, members, are something far more fundamental: the moral and economic owners of the scheme. Without members, there are no contributions. Without contributions, the fund is nothing but structure. Yet, in a telling exercise, when Mukoba asked the room how many members were present — as opposed to trustees or management — very few hands went up. His point was made without another word needing to be spoken.
This imbalance, Mukoba argued, sits at the heart of what he calls the Compliance Outcome Blind Spot — a structural disconnect between the metrics pension funds obsess over and the lived reality of the members they serve. A fund can tick every regulatory box, maintain modern ICT systems, file reports on time, and boast an approved governance framework, while simultaneously leaving a retired teacher in a rural village unable to pay a shopkeeper, settle a child’s school fees, or access their own money for years. “The scheme focuses on complying,” Mukoba observed, “but never focuses on the outcomes that are relevant to a member.”
To illustrate just how deeply this blind spot runs, Mukoba recalled a conversation with an auditor who had been auditing pension schemes for 19 years — and who was himself a pension fund member. When asked how he reviewed his own member statement, the auditor’s answer was striking: he checked his opening balance, confirmed his contributions, noted the interest figure, verified the closing balance, and if the numbers agreed, he was satisfied. He had no idea how the interest was calculated. If a seasoned pension auditor does not understand his own statement, Mukoba asked, what hope is there for the average member?
The human cost of this blind spot is not abstract. When benefit payments are delayed, when member records are inaccurate, and when complaints disappear into administrative black holes, the damage radiates outward into communities. Mukoba painted a vivid picture: a retired teacher, the village champion, who spent 35 years contributing faithfully to a pension scheme. Three years after retirement, that teacher still has not been paid. The local shopkeeper — the same person the pension industry is trying to recruit into the informal sector — is the one the teacher owes money to. When a pension fund representative arrives to persuade that shopkeeper to join, the answer is already written on the wall. “You’re telling the shopkeeper: can you join so that you end up like this teacher?” Mukoba noted. “It cannot work. Completely.”
This trust deficit, he argued, is one of the most significant barriers to expanding pension coverage across Africa — and no amount of regulatory compliance will resolve it. Africa’s pension industry, Mukoba stated plainly, is not short of regulation. What it is short of is member trust.
To address this, Mukoba introduced MOCA — the Member Outcomes Compliance Audit — a framework he has detailed extensively in his recently published book on institutional capacity building for the African pension sector. MOCA does not replace existing audits. Rather, it complements them by measuring what traditional audits consistently ignore: whether members actually received the outcomes they were entitled to, in a manner that was fair, timely, and dignified. Built around seven pillars — accuracy and benefits integrity, timeliness and predictability, clarity and member understanding, accessibility and dignity, fairness and equity, trust and voice and redress, and governance learning and continuous improvement — MOCA reframes pension oversight as a member-centred leadership instrument rather than a regulatory checkbox exercise.
The practical output of MOCA implementation includes member outcome scorecards with traffic-light dashboards, early warning indicators that flag deteriorating performance before it becomes a public crisis, and a Governance Assurance function that elevates member outcomes from a customer service issue to a board-level responsibility. Funds adopting MOCA can benchmark themselves against a five-tier MOCA Maturity Index, enabling continuous, structured improvement.
The shift MOCA demands is as cultural as it is structural: from defensive governance to demonstrable stewardship, and from process compliance to outcome accountability. “MOCA is not another audit,” Mukoba was clear. “It is a leadership instrument.”
In the section below, Mukoba expands on the informal sector’s unique barriers to pension inclusion, Kenya’s three-tier retirement structure, the psychology of retirement identity, the data infrastructure needed to protect modern pension systems, the looming sustainability challenge facing government pension systems, and why he believes the industry must abandon the concept of “retirement” altogether in favour of what he calls “pre-firement.” Excerpts:
You’ve argued that outcomes must matter more than compliance. How do we get pension fund CEOs to stop treating compliance like a tick-box exercise?
They need to ensure that the member comes first. Any time you are thinking about compliance or governance, make sure you involve the members. Because if the members are not involved, you have to look at it from a design thinking perspective. Involve the members — this is what is close to their hearts. Once you have that, then you build it into your compliance and governance framework. That is how it has to work.
You believe traditional African communal finance systems are blueprints for inclusion. How can modern digital pension technology bridge that gap?
We already have the systems working in Africa. Saving, contributing, coming together — the group dynamics are not foreign to us at all. The challenge is that when we design products, we never sit down and talk to the people. If you talk to them, you can come up with products that speak to what is close to their hearts — products designed to achieve goals. We come together in Africa to achieve specific goals, but pension products are not designed that way at all.
There is also a stark statistical reality. The average life expectancy in Africa is currently around 64 years. You are telling someone in the informal sector to save with you and only access their money at 60 — meaning they access it and then have perhaps four years before they die. It does not make sense to them. What we need instead are special schemes that spur economic growth at a grassroots level. Help people grow, and as you help them grow, you bring them into the pension ecosystem — and they never leave.
Over 80% of Africa’s workforce is in the informal sector. How do you make saving for retirement realistic for a gig worker or a small trader?
You blend two things. You design a product that has both a retirement component and a savings component. Because earnings in the informal sector are irregular, the product must accommodate that — when a gig worker earns, they contribute. But you also make it goal-oriented. Psychology tells us that once a person achieves a goal, they are ready to move to the next one. So you could design a product that starts at 100% savings and 0% retirement allocation. As the member achieves their savings goals, they gradually transition — 30/70, then 50/50 — until they are genuinely invested in their retirement future. You take care of the needs of all people across that spectrum.
How does Kenya’s pension system compare to other models across the continent?
Kenya operates a three-tier structure. Tier one is Social Security — the national base layer. Tier two is an additional layer that is managed by Social Security by default, but members can opt out and appoint a private administrator or fund manager. Tier three covers independent and occupational pension funds. We currently have approximately 1,400 pension funds in Kenya operating within that structure.
Unlike some other countries, Kenya does not have a universal government pension paid automatically at retirement age. What we do have is a small government stipend for citizens above 70 who have no form of income. The contrast with other models — such as those that provide a pension to all citizens from a certain age regardless of employment status — is significant. Each system reflects different levels of social protection and fiscal capacity, and there are real lessons to be shared across the continent.
As an IT architect, how can funds upgrade their data infrastructure to protect against cybersecurity threats?
We must be futuristic. First, there needs to be a data enrichment exercise — looking at your reporting, the kind of analytics you want, and the intelligence you want to extract. Second, even as we embrace AI, funds must invest in on-premise infrastructure. When you store everything in the cloud, you cede control of your data to a third party who can, one day, simply shut you out and you lose everything. Keep critical data on premise, and then you can build proper cybersecurity safeguards around it. Enrich the data, keep it on premise, and then layer the protections around it.
You advocate for what you call “pre-firement” rather than retirement. What do you mean by that?
Retirement has finality built into it. It tells you that on a particular date, you will become useless. Think about a teacher who has introduced themselves as “Teacher” for 35 years. That title becomes their entire identity. The day they retire, who are they? We focus so much on income replacement that we forget the holistic nature of life — identity, health, spirituality, time management. For 35 years, someone else managed your schedule. Then one day you wake up at 60 with money and unlimited time. What do you do?
What we should be doing is telling people, from the moment they start working and contributing, to start thinking about the preferred life they want. What are your passions? What can you do until the day you die, regardless of how long you live? Start investing in that alongside your pension contributions. Skill yourself in something you love. Then, when the time comes, you do not retire — you simply transition into a preferred life. That is pre-firement.
What is the biggest barrier to getting people to engage with pre-retirement planning?
The packaging. We call it financial literacy — but that phrase itself carries a negative connotation. If I am attending a financial literacy session, the implication is that I am not financially literate. People shy away from that. But when you bring in the broader reality — identity, health, relationships, time, purpose — and package it as a holistic conversation about life, people warm up to it. We rarely do that. That is the gap.
There is growing concern about the long-term sustainability of government pension systems. How should individuals and the industry be thinking about this?
This is one of the most pressing conversations we are not having loudly enough. What is happening across many countries is that we have fewer and fewer young contributors entering the workforce, while the older generation is living longer. At some point, the arithmetic simply does not work. Government pension systems funded by taxpayers depend on a growing base of contributors to support a growing base of retirees. When that ratio shifts — and it is shifting — the system comes under enormous strain.
People need to talk seriously about lifestyle inflation. The comfort you have now, supported by a government pension or employer scheme, may not be there for long. That is not pessimism — it is reality. And the earlier people understand it and plan accordingly, the better positioned they will be. We are giving people a false sense of comfort if we do not have this conversation honestly and early.
