Youth Savings: The Birth of a Stake in the Future

Since the inception of the Global Assets Project in 2006, I have advocated that having opportunities to save and accumulate assets earlier in life will lead to a more economically and socially secure future. Now, as I write my last blog post before beginning maternity leave to care for my first child, this assets “perspective” has transformed into much more of “reality.” Now more than ever, I am sensitive to the fact that we all need a fair and decent shot at success in life. Yet such success, all over the world, is often hindered by exclusion from a financial identity; from opportunities to save and grow assets, or from the policies and products that the better-off take for granted that allow them to accumulate wealth and pass it along from generation to generation.

And the research has shown that asset effects will have greater impact the earlier in life they begin. And this is true from Oklahoma to Uganda. In fact, New America Senior Research Fellow and Columbia Professor Fred Ssewamala‘s research continues to show that even small amounts of savings can have large impacts on a child, not only economically, but socially and psychologically. That is why the Global Assets Project has and continues to study, advocate and support policies, products and programs that enable savings among children and youth.

More recently, we’ve announced the launch of a MasterCard Foundation-funded effort to design a pilot program to test and implement savings products for young people in developing countries. Led by Save the Children, the Global Assets Project will provide research (through CSD at Washington University in St. Louis), policy analysis and communications (at the New America Foundation) for this program. The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor rounds out this global consortium, as a key partner in product development and regulatory policy research.

We’re working together to understand specific savings needs of this special population, and hopefully find ways to provide them with effective tools to save, building a foundation for a more prosperous future than they could have previously envisioned. Yet, financial institutions have yet to discover a universally accepted business case for providing specialized accounts to children or youth. And where they exist, they generally do not benefit the poor or very poor. So that is our goal: to find that “sweet spot” where “effectiveness” of the product relates to the client and the bank, not one or the other. We have our work cut out for us, but I’m optimistic by nature.

As I bring my own child into this economically uncertain and financially fragile world, I reflect with pride and gratitude on my role in a Project that has a vision of one day, accounts for all. And for all, a stake in the future.