NSSF’s FUTURE LIES BEYOND THE TRILLIONS

Later this morning the interest that NSSF will pay on members’ savings for the 2024/25 financial year will be announced.

A double digit interest payout is not an unreasonable expectation going by the year’s performance.

I still remember when the Fund’s assets first crossed the one trillion shilling mark back in 2004. It was headline news at the time, proof that Uganda was finally building local savings muscle. Two decades later, the 2024/25 results tell a story that borders on the surreal: Assets Under Management surged 17.5 percent from sh22.1 trillion to sh26 trillion, revenues crested sh3.5 trillion, and the cost-to-income ratio fell to 7.9 percent, a level global asset managers would envy. The temptation is to treat these numbers as the final destination.

But in truth they are only scaffolding. The real story is not how much NSSF has, but what it can do with what it has.

Strip away the polite phrasing at the Annual Media Dialogue that happened recently, and what you see is a de facto sovereign wealth fund. With eight in every ten shillings of its assets in fixed income, NSSF is underwriting government spending, stabilising the shilling, and backstopping the bond market.

No bank, no insurer, no private investor comes close to wielding this kind of financial clout. But if all the Fund does is mop up government paper and occasionally dabble in equities and real estate, then it remains a glorified bondholder. The real test of Vision 2035 is whether NSSF can evolve into a nation-builder, deploying its capital in ways that multiply growth, expand opportunity, and deepen trust...

This is where Hi-Innovator comes in. Tucked away from the headline slides of AUM and compliance ratios, the program may be the Fund’s most transformative play. For the first time, NSSF isn’t just investing in bricks, bonds, and blue chips—it is seeding Uganda’s entrepreneurial DNA.

The genius of Hi-Innovator is leverage. A shilling put into a government bond earns a predictable coupon. A shilling put into a start-up that cracks logistics, agritech, or fintech can multiply value not only for the Fund but for the economy at large. Every successful enterprise that grows out of Hi-Innovator expands the tax base, creates formal jobs, and ironically, produces the very contributors who will help NSSF hit its ambitious 50 percent coverage target by 2035. This is not philanthropy. It’s strategy. By nurturing tomorrow’s employers, NSSF is tackling its biggest structural headache: a formal sector that’s too narrow to sustain pension growth.

There is also the political economy at play.

Every September, when the Minister declares the Fund’s interest rate, millions of Ugandans lean in. That number is more than a return; it is a signal of trust. But what if trust was anchored not just in payouts, but in impact? Imagine a boda rider saving through Smartlife Flexi, knowing his contributions are not only compounding for retirement but also funding a fintech that makes his daily hustle more efficient. That is how the Fund moves from custodian of savings to custodian of hope.

The published Vision 2035 targets are bold: sh50 trillion in assets, 50 percent workforce coverage, and 95 percent customer satisfaction. But the unwritten vision is more radical. It is to turn Uganda’s pension fund into a development engine—mobilising savings not just to park in paper, but to ignite enterprise, innovation, and national transformation. Hi-Innovator is the wedge that makes this plausible. It bridges the gap between trillions passively managed and trillions actively shaping an economy. It is where savings morph into seed capital, where passive investors become active nation-builders.

The Fund has proven it can count the money. The next frontier is whether it can make the money count. By blending the predictability of bonds with the dynamism of entrepreneurship, NSSF can create a hybrid model—one that secures members’ retirement while laying the foundation for a more inclusive, innovative economy...

With the mechanism for collecting and investing savings now firmly set, the only thing that can let workers down is a failure of governance—mismanagement, short-term political interference, or corruption eroding the trust built over decades. That is the real risk.

But if governance holds, the unseen prospect is immense: not just in the sh26 trillion already managed, nor even in the sh50 trillion targeted by 2035, but in the ripple effects of every shilling channeled into a start-up that grows into an employer of hundreds, maybe thousands. That is the real multiplier.

The 2024/25 results confirm NSSF’s financial muscle. But the true measure of its future will not be the size of its balance sheet, but the scale of its imagination. If Vision 2025 was about building financial muscle, Vision 2035 must be about flexing it—transforming savings into the seed capital of a new Uganda.