The impact of financial education for youth in Ghana

• Description of the programme:
• The study:
• Key findings:
• Points to consider:

Description of the programme:

The two programmes evaluated are the Aflatoun curriculum and the HMB curriculum. The latter contained the financial but not the social components of the Aflatoun treatment. Both programmes sought to teach children the importance of money, savings and spending, planning and budgeting, personal finances, and entrepreneurship.

The additional social components of the Aflatoun treatment included sessions on personal exploration and childrens’ rights and responsibilities. The curriculum also included several stories about children who were forced to work instead of attending school, emphasising the difficult and dangerous working conditions experienced by children and encouraging them to see child labour as a violation of their basic rights. Both programmes took place in public schools. 72 schools took part in the programmes.

The study:

From a list of 165 eligible schools 135 were randomly selected to be included in the programme, including primary (grades 1-6), junior high (grades 7 and 8), and ‘basic’ (combined primary and junior secondary) schools in three districts. Within each district, sample schools were sorted by average within-grade class size and then grouped into ‘triplets’, and assigned to the Aflatoun intervention, the HMB intervention, or a control group.

The programme sampled an average of 40 students from each school in the study, largely from grades 5 and 7, from September 2010 to July 2011. Questions covered 11 indices: savings behaviour, savings attitudes, home savings support, work, risk preference, time preference, financial literacy, expenditure on self, expenditure on ‘temptation goods’, confidence, and academic performance.

The evaluation presents a partial analysis of the characteristics of children who took up the programmes in these schools, limited by the evaluator’s inability to collect complete take-up information for all schools.

Key findings:

• Knowledge and behaviour: Neither the Aflatoun and HMB programmes led to increased savings knowledge or behaviour. The lack of an effect on the total savings suggests that the programme caused students to move their savings to school accounts rather than to save more.
• Child labour: Neither treatment encouraged children to seek paid work, but the Aflatoun program explicitly discouraged child work. The HMB group reported increased work, but did not appear to result in increased earnings.
• Risk and time: Neither programme appeared to impact student attitudes to risk (willingness to take risks for greater financial gain) or time (willingness to defer income in order to increase overall income).
• Financial literacy: The effects of the programs on the financial literacy index are small and not statistically significant.
• Confidence: The programmes appeared to have little, if any, impact on child confidence. If anything the impact was negative, with more children in the Aflatoun group agreeing with the statement ‘Teacher makes you feel you are not good enough’ after the course, however the authors argue that this result should be treated with caution.
• Performance: There was no evidence that the programmes impacted school attendance or overall performance.

Points to consider:

Methodological limitations:

• The study is not entirely coherent. For example, the authors state that the programmes had ‘positive and significant impacts on savings behaviour’, but also note that there was ‘no impact on the percentage of children who save nor on the total amount saved’.
• There are few results of note, and most which are documented are not statistically significant.
• The study took place over quite a short period (October 2010 to July 2011. A number of schools established programmes late in the period (starting as late as January and February 2011).
• The authors do not have attendance or participation data for all students/schools.

Relevance:

• Given the methodological limitations listed above findings should be treated with caution.

Generalisability/ transferability:

• Learnings from this study are not easily transferable to other contexts due to the limitations listed.