Vani: Need to provide financial literacy training

THERE is a need to provide tailored financial literacy training to families to better manage their funds.

This was the response from Fiji Council of Social Services (FCOSS) executive director Vani Catanasiga.

She was asked to comment on the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2019/2020, which showed spending on items such as cigarettes, alcohol and grog had increased substantially as compared with the last survey.

“We sound like a broken record,” Ms Catanasiga said.

“We said from the moment that Fijian Government started to use cash vouchers, cash transfers as a tool for social protection. We did say that there’s some risk to this.

“We had red flagged cash transfers, because you’re still open to that possibility of abuse and what we’ve seen in HIES is a great example of what we were trying to say at that time in 2020/2021; stick to cash vouchers because we’ve had that experience as well.”

Ms Catanasiga said there was not enough monitoring, and the HIES was an example of what could happen in the longer term.

“It’s well intentioned, we get that, we want to support families who are vulnerable. But you’ve got to also think about the longer-term impacts.

“Last year, when we were on the margins of the National Economic Summit, our members also met to talk about debt, public debt. And one of the key recommendations that came out of that is, we need immediate support to do financial literacy for families.

“That means teaching families how to do budgeting, saying maybe this is something you don’t need, cut that out. So, we have to think ahead.”

She said while this was not done, however, she did not blame Government as it was only their first year in office.

“But, going forward this year, we hope to have more support for financial literacy, communal gardens.

“More local food, healthy, nutritious, particularly with our health facilities in these conditions so government has to be able to think ahead.

“It has to be able to project if this is what has happened, these are going to be the longer-term impacts. How do we mitigate and how do we partner with civil society and private sector to be able to do that?”

She said they were already working to promote financial literacy in communities with whatever little resources they had, however, they were open to more assistance from Government.