Managing finances is a challenge for all families, but particularly for the poor.  They often have precarious livelihood strategies, scarce resources and, until recently, limited access to financial services.  With an increasing number of complex microfinance products and services available to the poor, including credit for housing and education, current and long-term savings accounts, money transfers, and insurance, poor clients might not understand all of their options nor how to use them to their advantage.

Financial education provides the poor with the necessary knowledge, skills and confidence to navigate the ever-more-complex financial system—to understand different products’ features, how to calculate and compare their costs, and how to determine and select what they can afford and what is most appropriate to their needs.  Moreover, financial education strengthens their ability to manage their scarce resources with useful tools for budgeting, saving, borrowing and spending. 

Launched in 2003, FEP’s initial phase involved partnership with seven institutions to develop and test a financial education curriculum.  These partners included ProMujer (Bolivia), Teba Bank (South Africa), Al Amana (Morocco), Equity Building Society (Kenya), SEWA Bank (India), CARD Bank (Philippines), and the Microfinance Center (Poland).  First, the partners engaged in a market research process to determine their clients’ financial education priorities.  Next, using the market research data and Freedom from Hunger’s recognized approach to adult education, they developed and pilot-tested a series of financial education modules. The result was a field-based curriculum comprising five distinct modules:

• Budgeting: Use Money Wisely

• Savings: You Can Do It!

• Debt Management: Handle With Care

• Bank Services: Know Your Options

• Financial Negotiations: Communicate With Confidence

Now in the second phase of the project, Microfinance Opportunities and Freedom from Hunger are engaged in the global dissemination of this curriculum and the development of new financial education modules.  To disseminate the curriculum broadly in the microfinance community and beyond, FEP is utilizing a cascade approach, starting with a series of five regional training-of-trainers workshops followed by in-country trainings to support strong institutions that will implement training in their own countries. The objective of this approach is to develop a cadre of master trainers at 60 microfinance institutions who will deliver financial education to at least two million people throughout the world.  New curricula will be disseminated as they are developed.  Themes will include remittances, consumer education, insurance, risk management and financial education targeting adolescents.