PROJECTS IN FOCUS
Financial Literacy and You
Empowering through knowledge
Financial literacy not only plays a crucial role in determining individuals’ financial health, it also is an indicator of the financial wellbeing of a nation. Low financial literacy level increases the risk of financial instability for an individual, and if a significant proportion of the population misallocates its money, the pressure on the national economy increases. Many of you may not be aware that India has about 253,000,000 adolescents who are transiting to adulthood. Considering that the future of the country lies in the hands and minds of these children, it is important that each one of them is able to make informed decisions when it comes to managing money. Each one of them should become independent in terms of planning their living as per their income and managing their financial priorities in life.
When it comes to financial matters—in other words, the ability to understand how money works in this world, you are never really done learning. Every time you think you have learned the art of managing money, some event tells you that you missed something somewhere. Most of you have gained financial wisdom through trial and error, in the course of losing a significant amount of wealth and facing tension, anxiety and stress – perhaps some of you made wrong investments in banks, or bought a wrong piece of land.
Only if you were informed and aware about how
best to manage monies back in your adolescent years, you might not have faced those hardships. This is where financial literacy programmes come into the picture. Focusing on adolescents, the overall objective of these programmes is to make them aware about how someone manages to earn or make money, how they manage it, how they invest it (turn it into more), and how they may donate some of it to help others.
Specifically, financial awareness refers to the set of skills and knowledge that allows an individual to make informed and effective decisions with all of their financial resources. Development Programme (Policy & Research) and conceptualized the Financial Literacy & You programme. The Voice team partnered with UNDP to implement the pilot project in and around National Capital Region (NCR). For over six months the team engaged in various financial-literacy interventions and financial-inclusion programmes targeted at adolescents in the age group of 11 years to 18 years in selected urban-slum areas.