Keeping the YouthSave Collaboration Going

In April and May YouthSave brought together over 150 key
local stakeholders in Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, and Nepal to discuss how to
advance the youth savings agenda now that the project is over.  Attendees included government
representatives, such as the Minister of Youth in Ghana and the Central Bank
Governor in Nepal; financial institutions, including the CEOs of 10 local
commercial banks in Nepal; key civil society/support organizations like FSD in
Kenya; and donors including USAID, DFID, and of course representatives of The
MasterCard Foundation. In Colombia, the event was co-sponsored by the financial
inclusion unit of the Ministry of Finance and CYFI, which was invaluable in
attracting a diverse audience of key local organizations.

A few key themes emerged from these discussions:

•       Financial
  education was the subject of much interest; stakeholders were particularly
  supportive of sustaining the momentum behind pilots currently underway to
  integrate financial literacy into national school curricula in Kenya and
  Colombia. Banks in Colombia and Ghana also voiced interest in finding ways to
  help deliver financial education to young people, potentially in collaboration
  with each other, with schools and, particularly for out-of-school youth, with NGOs.
  Stakeholders in Nepal stressed that financial capability programming should
  also be complemented with livelihoods skill building.
•       In Kenya, there was also significant interest in
  finding ways for youth under 18 to access mobile
  wallets or mobile money-linked accounts, which would alleviate some key
  constraints to access and usage while providing youth with much of what they
  need in a savings vehicle. A coalition of key stakeholders, spearheaded by
  KIPPRA, will be exploring how this could be achieved, at least on a pilot
  basis. Recent strides by Postbank in enhancing account attractiveness, by
  allowing trusted adults to grant permission to youth to operate accounts
  independently, could provide a boost to these efforts.
•       Several ideas surfaced around linking savings to pre-existing financial
  flows. For example, two attendees in Ghana and Nepal independently floated
  the possibility of adding a small savings deposit to school fee payments. In
  Nepal, there was considerable interest in leveraging the country’s substantial
  remittance flows to build savings for young people.

A final theme uniting all four
events was the importance of cross-sectoral collaboration to move youth savings
forward. Helping young people build assets will take the combined capabilities
and talents of the financial sector, policy makers, donors, educators, civil
society, parents, communities, and youth themselves. The challenges of
coordinating such disparate players are not insignificant, but these events
were another step in building the relationships and momentum needed to foster such
critical collaboration.  

(Left: A
TV reporter interviews Dr. David Ansong after his presentation at the second of
two dissemination events in Ghana.)