Guide / Toolkit
Assessing the Outcomes of Financial Education (Working Paper #3)
How to assess the outcomes and impacts of financial education programs?
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46 pages
This paper presents a framework for studying the outcomes and impacts of financial education programs.The paper focuses specifically on outcomes of financial literacy in five thematic areas. These include:
- Budgeting;
- Savings;
- Debt management;
- Financial negotiations;
- Bank services.
Under each thematic area, the paper suggests indicators to study changes in:
- Financial knowledge;
- Skills and attitudes;
- Financial behaviors and practices;
- Financial outcomes.
The paper asserts that systematic outcome assessments can enhance understanding of:
- What works and why?
- How can financial education programs be improved?
- What is the value of investing in them?
It concludes that, in future, evaluation of outcomes and impacts of financial education programs should include a focus on:
- Translation of indicators of financial knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviors and outcomes into appropriate measures of change;
- Establishment of benchmarks of behavior change that can be expected from financial education programs;
- Development of simple, practitioner-led progress tracking systems;
- Expansion and elaboration of a conceptual framework to guide the design of financial education impact assessments.
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