So, What's Different About YouthSave?

On May 6^th Reeta Roy, the President and CEO of the MasterCard Foundation, announced a grant of $12.5 million for YouthSave, a learning project that will test the impact of youth savings accounts on 170,000 young people between 12 and 18 years. This project comes at an opportune moment as the numbers of youth in the world swell to over three billion, the largest ever. Half a billion live on less than $2 a day and less than 10% have access to financial services. Many practitioners and researchers are engaged in creating wealth and opportunity for poor youth, as illustrated in this report.

Here’s how YouthSave is different:

•  Implementation by a multi-disciplinary team: Save the Children, Center for Social Development at Washington University in St Louis, CGAP and New America Foundation all bring a unique set of skills in project implementation, research, policy analysis and communications. Different types of organizations interested in the same goal will hopefully lead to a fresh approach in making financial services accessible to poor, vulnerable youth.
•  Four countries in three continents: The pilot will be implemented in Colombia, Ghana, Kenya and Nepal and include youth in urban as well as rural settings and who are from different socio-cultural backgrounds. This will provide a large landscape for testing this model out and glean lessons that can be applied to a variety of contexts. 
•  Involving local partners: A key aspect of implementation will include partnering with local financial and research institutions and other stakeholders from public and private sector. This will allow the project to not only build local capacity but also, more importantly, gain from local knowledge and expertise.
•  Mixed methods of research: Research will include quantitative surveys as well as qualitative case studies, aiming to present a full picture of whether and how youth savings can work.

The consortium is starting to build a website which will not only provide details about YouthSave but also be a repository of varied resources for this field of practice. Till that is set-up in the next few months, watch this space for updates and more information.

To know more about the state of current practice in the field of youth savings, click here to read the consortium’s latest report.