Taking Stock: Financial Education Initiatives for the Poor
This report explores the landscape of financial education programs for poor households. It focuses on three aspects, namely, enhancing impact, increasing scale and sustaining access.
The report summarizes findings from case studies of 12 diverse financial education programs. It examines various aspects of successful financial education programs including:
- Objectives of financial education such as consumer protection, product uptake and personal development of consumers;
- Target audience;
- Content and delivery channels;
- Achieving scale in financial education;
- Costs involved in financial education;
- Factors that help sustain financial education.
The report identifies four prerequisites for the success of financial education programs. These are quality and frequency of programs, relevance of the program to the target audience, opportunity to apply learning, and opportunities for people to apply the new financial behaviours. The report includes an appendix with detailed case studies of profiled programs and specific lessons learnt from each program.
