How We Work

The Pensions Across Borders Initiatives

Is For Donors Who Want A Low-Cost And Efficient Way To Protect People At Scale Against Old-Age Poverty.

Donors can be companies, foundations, individuals and development organisations who want to make substantial payments, leverage extra impact from their money and securely target the right recipients.

Our approach brings tried and tested approaches to pensions and payment to a wider group of countries and hence enables donors to help more low-income people in more countries across the world.

Key

Requirements

The First Key Requirement

Is that there is a decent pension infrastructure in the home country of the low-income saver so that they can save in an individual account they own and from which they will benefit.

PAB Initiative

The PAB initiative assesses the quality of the domestic pension system and whether the international transfers can be made safely now – or if some reforms are needed. 

The Second Key Requirement

Is that the home country allows transfers from foreign donors into pension accounts. 

 

PAB Transfers And Reforms

Transfers can be made safely into pension accounts now PAB work with the donors and the home country government to make the transfers happen.

Reforms are needed PAB use our expertise to fill gaps in either the pensions or payments side and then moves to making the transfers happen.

Donors can support low-income pension savers in developing countries in four main ways:

i) Make donations targeted at low-income savers in a specific country (where we assess the pension system is of sufficient quality to safely receive and lock in donor contributions);

ii) Make donations to a particular sector in a country e.g. a global garment manufacturer might want to help boost pension saving for garment workers;

iii) Make donations to a particular segment e.g. people currently without pension accounts to encourage them to open one or people who have made some contributions but are finding regular contributions difficult; and

iv) For all types of giving, test the impact of different ways to give e.g. offer unconditional contributions, or contributions that match the savers’ own contributions at different levels of generosity or offer higher value incentives to encourage account opening

We offer high quality research and evaluation to boost impact

  • All donor-funded programmes should be subject to monitoring and evaluation to ensure that they are delivering the best results.
  • They should also build in a ‘design-test-adapt’ approach to delivery so that new approaches are tested to try and continually improve the outcomes that can be achieved.
  • The PAB initiative is able to bring both aspects of evaluation and adaptation as a core part of the initiative by working with country authorities to allow the targeting and testing of different approaches.
  • A donor could explore how different matching rates for individual contributions impact total contributions to see whether matching 20%, 50% or 100% of an individual’s contributions has the biggest impact – or whether offering staged lump-sum transfers or funding a prize fund for enrolled savers are more effective.
  • Donors could target workers in particularly sectors – for example where this aligns with a company’s Corporate Social Responsibility focus or areas of operations.
  • The initiative allows donors interested in funding research in behavioural economics and the impacts of different kinds of incentives or delivery processes or messaging to have real-life examples with which to engage and draw insight.
  • Because international digital payments and secure pension accounts with unique IDs are by their nature transparent and trackable the costs of research and evaluation will be lower than a traditional development project and the potential for robust results higher.

How Pensions Across Borders and migrant worker remittances combine to create a global family of donors

  • The vision of Pensions Across Borders is to improve pensions for up to one billion low-income people globally who face poverty in old age.

  • This helps to enhance the activities of nearly 200 million migrant workers who send billions each year back to their families to finance consumption, medical costs, invest in business and saving.

  • The remittance channels used by migrants can be overly expensive and the pension and saving options difficult to navigate as they grapple with a variety of ‘home’ and ‘host’ country complexities.

  • The PAB initiative can help directly with its own donors, but also help migrants who make remittances to their own families, as it improves the way in which international money transfers can connect to domestic pension systems.

  • The additional scale in donor transfers and expertise in pensions and payments brought by the PAB initiative can help to create channels for use by anyone who wants to make payments – and provide an additional incentive to governments and regulators to make any changes needed.

  • The combined force of the PAB initiative and the US$ 700 bn annual remittance flows from migrants can help to shift the dynamics of pension contributions and ensure a global family of contributors to help those who suffer from lack of income to ensure a decent old age.

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