Event on May 6: Spring-boarding Youth To a Better Future – Can Youth Savings Accounts Be the Answer?

Three billion people today are under the age of twenty-five, half a billion of these live on less than $2 a day and less than 10% have access to financial services.  For those of us who envision a peaceful future world not plagued by poverty, we share a sense of urgency to find ways to provide opportunity and growth for this large, underserved population.  We ask a simple question: How can we catapult low-income and poor youth to a better future? Next Thursday’s forum at the New America Foundation will explore if youth savings accounts may be part of the answer.

Over the last twenty years a growing body of work has demonstrated how savings, when combined with financial literacy, can provide young people with tools to improve their livelihoods and future opportunities and also lead to positive changes in behavior. For example:

• Research by the Population Council and MicroSave found that group-based youth savings encouraged social interaction and training opportunities that resulted in better self esteem and HIV prevention behavior in the slums of Nairobi.
• Similarly, in his research, Fred Ssewamala found that giving bank accounts to orphaned children in Uganda improved not only their HIV prevention attitudes but the participants had also improved their educational plans and become more optimistic about the future.

At next week’s event, we’ll release a new report “Youth Savings in Developing Countries: Trends in Practice, Gaps in Knowledge”, which presents the state of practice in this field, analyzing products, programs, policies and research, in more than 25 countries around the globe. It also analyses the gaps of knowledge that currently exist, for instance, can we safely argue that banks will find youth savings products to be commercially viable?

At the event, a variety of internationally renowned experts from financial and research institutions as well as development agencies, will be discussing the value of combining youth development with financial inclusion. Some of the key speakers include:

• Reeta Roy (President and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation)
• Michael Sherraden (Director of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St Louis and recently named by TIME Magazine as one the world’s top 100 influential people).
• Chandula Abeywickrema (Deputy General Manager, Hatton National Bank in Sri Lanka and Chairman of the Banking with the Poor Network)

• How best can we develop a product that would lead to more opportunities for low-income youth?
• How best can we evaluate these products, programs and policies that offer financial inclusion for youth?
• How can we influence policy level dialogue that will lead to sustainable and comprehensive financial inclusion?

For more details and to RSVP, please click here.