Forty years of nothing

This series examines tax justice through a feminist lens. Previous pieces asked who holds power over tax systems, how gender assumptions are baked into fiscal policy, what it means to be an economic ghost, and how daily levies extract without recording. This article unpacks the second layer of invisibility named in Part Three: what happens to the economic ghost when she is old.

The woman who pays market fees for forty years will retire with nothing. The woman who pays presumptive tax on her small business builds no pension contribution history. Pension systems are designed for formal, continuous, long-term employment. Women's working lives do not fit this mould. They work, they contribute, they age, and they are left with nothing.

We start where the pattern is sharpest: with the women whose lifelong contributions leave no trace when they need them most.

The woman who will work until she dies

She is sixty years old. She has sold in the market since she was twenty. Forty years of dawns. Forty years of fees. Forty years of coins disappearing into hands she could not name.

Her knees hurt now. The walk to the market takes longer. The sacks of tomatoes feel heavier. But she cannot stop. There is no pension waiting for her. No monthly payment from a system that recorded her contributions. No recognition that she paid, for four decades, into the economy she helped sustain.

She will work until her body will not let her. Then her children will carry her. If they can.

This is not her failure. It is the system's design.

Who pension systems are built for

Pension systems have a template. It looks like this: one employer, continuous employment, formal contract, regular salary, decades of uninterrupted contributions. At the end, a monthly payment. A reward for a lifetime of work.

This template also assumes a package: monthly income, medical insurance, funeral coverage, a lump sum at retirement. The formal worker leaves with more than a pension. She leaves with a cushion against every risk of old age.

This template fits a certain kind of worker. The civil servant. The corporate employee. The man whose working life was never interrupted by childbirth, by care, by the need to feed children while earning.

It does not fit the market trader. It does not fit the domestic worker who moves from house to house. It does not fit the woman who cycles between formal and informal work as her circumstances shift. It does not fit the woman who took ten years out to raise children and never caught up. It does not fit the woman who was always informal, always invisible, always paying without being counted.

These women work. They contribute. They sustain economies. But the pension system was not designed for them. It was designed for someone else.

The market trader's forty years

Consider her again. Forty years of market fees. Forty years of presumptive tax on her small business. Forty years of VAT on everything she bought—food, clothes, medicine, cooking fuel. She has paid taxes her entire life.

Ask her to prove it. She has receipts in a plastic bag. Anonymous. Undated. Unverifiable.

Ask the pension system to count her contributions. It cannot. Her payments were never linked to her name. No TIN followed her through life. No record accumulated. She was a source of revenue, but never a subject of recognition.

When she reaches sixty, the system asks: where is your contribution history? She points to forty years of work. The system says: we have no record of that.

She is not eligible.

She is also not eligible for medical insurance. Not eligible for a retirement lump sum. Not eligible for funeral support. When she falls sick, she pays from her pocket or borrows from her children. When she dies, her family will bury her with whatever they can gather, or whatever her savings group can give.

The domestic worker's invisible labour

She cleans houses. Five different homes, six days a week. She has done this for thirty years. No contract. No payslip. No employer deducting pension contributions. Cash in hand, every evening.

She pays tax. VAT on everything she buys. Tax on her labour, if the system reaches her. She contributes.

When she is too old to scrub floors, what supports her? No monthly pension. No medical insurance. No funeral plan. Her children, if they can. Her savings, if she had any. Her body, until it gives out.

The pension system does not know she exists. She was never in its records. She was never meant to be.

The woman who fell through every crack

She worked for ten years in a factory. Formal job. Pension contributions deducted. Then the factory closed. She started selling food from her home. Informal. No contributions.

She found another formal job five years later. New contributions began. Then her mother fell ill and she stayed home to care. No work. No contributions.

She returned to the market. Informal. Ten more years. Then formal again, briefly. Then informal until she could not work anymore.

Her contribution history looks like a broken line. Gaps. Interruptions. Periods of formal work that were too short to vest. Periods of informal work that left no trace.

When she applies for a pension, the system adds up her formal contributions. They are not enough. The informal years do not count. She worked her whole life. The system says she did not work enough.

What women build when the system builds nothing 

Women do not wait for the system to save them. They organise. Savings groups meet weekly. When someone falls sick, the group pays. When someone needs capital, the group lends. When someone dies, the group covers the funeral.

This is brilliance. It is mutual aid. It is survival.

Peer collateral for loans. Peer support for emergencies. Peer protection against every risk the system ignores. Women weave safety nets from the threads of their own poverty.

But a savings group is not a pension. It cannot carry a woman who stops contributing because she is too old to work. It cannot provide for thirty years of retirement. It cannot guarantee that a woman who has paid into the group for decades will be supported when she can no longer pay.

The group fills the gap the system left. It should not have to.

Two later articles in this series examine what women build when the system fails them—and why even their ingenuity is not enough. Part Eight explores the safety net women weave from poverty. Part Nine asks whether twenty years to climb from mice to goats is justice or indictment.

What the state offers instead

In Uganda, the Senior Citizens' Grant was designed to reach those the pension system excludes. Originally for citizens aged sixty-five and above. Then the age was raised to eighty.

Uganda's life expectancy is sixty-eight.

A woman who reaches eighty has already outlived most of her generation. She is the exception, not the rule. The grant will not reach her. It was not designed to.

For the few who qualify, the monthly amount is equivalent to approximately seven US dollars.

Seven dollars cannot pay for a helper, even in a rural area where costs are low. It cannot pay for food and medicine both. It cannot cover transport to a clinic. It is a gesture. A symbol. A way for the state to say "we tried" while doing nothing that changes a life.

This is not social protection. It is a sick joke dressed in policy language.

Who bears the cost?

When women cannot retire, someone bears the cost.

Their children do. Daughters especially. The daughter who must now support her mother while also raising her own children, while also working, while also trying to save for her own old age that may look the same.

Their communities do. Neighbours who share food, who help with rent, who carry the weight collectively because the system will not.

Their bodies do. Working until they collapse. Ignoring pain because there is no choice. Dying earlier than they should because a lifetime of labour without support wears them down.

The cost does not disappear. It shifts. From the system that should have paid, to the families who cannot afford it.

What would change if her years counted?

Some places are experimenting.

In some countries, voluntary pension schemes allow informal workers to contribute. The market trader can pay into a fund, month by month, building her own history. The state matches a portion. Over years, it grows.

In others, digital payment records are accepted as proof of contribution. The woman with an SMS receipt for her market fees can use that record to show she was economically active. The system begins to see her.

In a few places, universal social pensions exist. Paid to everyone above a certain age regardless of contribution history. Funded by progressive taxation. A recognition that a lifetime of work—formal or informal, counted or uncounted—earns a floor of dignity in old age.

These are fragments. They are not yet systems. They show what is possible.

But a voluntary scheme is not a right. A digital record is not a guarantee. A universal pension is not yet universal.

The question is not whether we can design systems that see all working lives. The technology exists. The will is the question.

What would it take?

What would it take for the market trader's forty years to count?

It would take a system that recorded her payments from the first coin. A TIN that followed her through every transaction. A pension fund that accepted small, irregular contributions and tracked them across decades. A recognition that a lifetime of informal work is still a lifetime of work.

It would take medical insurance that did not depend on formal employment. Funeral coverage that recognised the groups she already built. A retirement lump sum drawn from the taxes she paid all her life, not from contributions she was never allowed to make.

It would take building on what women have already built. The savings groups, the emergency funds, the mutual aid. These are not primitive substitutes. They are foundations. The question is whether the state will build on them—matching contributions, offering reinsurance, linking them to formal pensions—or leave women to keep weaving ropes from poverty.

It would take a shift from asking "did you contribute formally?" to asking "did you work, did you pay, did you contribute to the economy that made us all wealthier?"

It would take the will to see her. Not as a source of revenue, but as a subject of rights.

The question that remains

She is sixty years old. She has sold in the market since she was twenty. Forty years of dawns. Forty years of fees. Forty years of coins.

When she can no longer lift the sacks, what will support her?

Her children, if they can. Her neighbours, if they share. Her body, until it breaks. Her savings group, for as long as she can pay into it.

The system that collected from her for forty years will offer nothing. It will say she does not qualify. It will say she did not contribute enough.

But she did contribute. Every dawn. Every coin. Every day.

The question is not whether she worked. It is whether we will count her work. It is whether we will design systems that see her. It is whether we will let her years, her labour, her lifelong contribution—mean something when she needs it most.