Executive Director of Child and Youth Finance International Jeroo Billimoria will serve as a Workshop Panelist at the Global Microcredit Summit to be held November 14-17, 2011 in Valladolid, Spain. The workshop is titled: “Growing Potential: Microfinance-Plus Approaches to Cultivating the New Generation of Young Clients. The Summit will bring together more than 2000 participants from over 100 countries.  Confirmed participants include H.M. Queen Sofía of Spain, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus and Sir Fazle Abed of BRAC.  Delegates will have the opportunity to participate in 6 plenary sessions, more than 50 workshops, over 30 associated sessions, a variety of day-long courses, as well as field visits to leading institutions around the world in the days before the Summit. Delegates from over 60 countries are already confirmed! For more information go to: http://www.globalmicrocreditsummit2011.org/

Follow Jeroo on Twitter: @jeroobillimoria

Child and Youth Finance International (CYFI) was invited to participate in the two day seminar hosted by the Bank of Italy for financial regulators interested in the topic of financial education. Central Bank representatives from 25 countries attended the conference to review the research conducted by the Bank of Italy and the OECD on financial education and the evaluation of financial literacy programs around the world.

UNICEF has released its "State of the World's Children 2011"-report featuring a comment by ChildFinance's CEO Jeroo Billimoria. Read the entire post below or on UNICEF's site with more links and articles about the topic here: "The State of the World's Children 2011 - Adolescence: An Age of Opportunity"

ChildFinance: The next step in advancing children's rights

Although the Convention on the Rights of the Child gave children a voice and outlined their rights to survival, protection, development and participation, there remains a key set of rights for the child that has not been addressed: economic rights. These include the right to access education about money and resources, and the right to access to safe financial services.

As the world struggles to recover from the negative effects of the current financial crisis, what steps should child rights organizations take to ensure that every child benefits from basic economic rights?

I believe the answer - and the power - lies within the children themselves. They have the ability to change their lives and influence the lives of their families and communities. An organization's role is simply to create an environment that allows children to best express themselves and provides them with the freedom and resources to take change into their own hands.

Aflatoun has proven that this is achievable. Our social and financial education programme encourages more than half a million children, aged 6 to 18 years old, in 75 countries to recognize their rights, believe in themselves, save, plan, budget and even set up their own small-scale enterprises. Following 18 years of research, Aflatoun has demonstrated that children are able to understand basic financial concepts and enjoy saving and conducting their own microinitiatives. In addition to using several age-specific workbooks, teachers are trained in progressive, child-centred methodologies, and our curriculum focuses on art, games and theatre to make learning as enjoyable as it is effective.

Allowing children to develop sound financial knowledge and habits, and creating a safe environment in which they can put their financial skills into practice, will empower them at an age when they are open to this knowledge and experience. For adolescents in particular, greater financial know-how is necessary to building self-confidence and to making better, more responsible financial decisions. This increased capability, in turn, can help them avoid financial mismanagement, fraud and uncontrollable debt - frightening realities that can drive them deeper into poverty.

ChildFinance, an initative developed from the experiences of Aflatoun and other organizations working in the field of financial literacy for children, aims to create a direct link between children and financial systems. It does so by promoting increased social and financial education and the creation of a secure environment that supports children's access to safe financial products and services, such as savings accounts. The initiative is based on the idea that financially aware and empowered children can make a difference in their own lives and build a foundation toward becoming financially responsible citizens.

One of my favourite stories from Aflatoun is that of Savitrie, who was a bright young girl of 12 when we met in India. Savitrie told me that taking part in Aflatoun's informal savings programme had developed her self-confidence and taught her to how to save and budget her money. Rather than marrying at a young age, she chose to use her savings to continue her schooling. What she learned at school she taught to her siblings and her mother, encouraging them to save as well. I recently learned that Savitrie is training to be a teacher, hoping to pass on these same lessons to future generations.

Safe and accessible financial services for children should be a priority on national and international agendas. Programmes like Aflatoun's and initiatives like ChildFinance bring together a network of key partners from within the financial, governmental, academic and child's rights fields to push for increased economic rights for children worldwide.

I urge the Committee on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF and others in the child's rights community to ensure that the basic financial rights of children - the right to financial education and access to safe financial services. By providing and encouraging widespread social and financial education programmes and setting up school banks allowing children access to savings systems, we can play our part in the greater movement. Through these endeavours, children like Savitrie can claim their basic rights and effect widespread positive change.

Jeroo Billimoria is the founder of Child Helpline International, Childline India Foundation, MelJol, the Credibility Alliance and Aflatoun. Building on Aflatoun's success in providing financial education, she asserts that ChildFinance is poised to promote financial literacy and create a network of safe financial services for 100 million children by 2020.

The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters was held January 26 - 30, 2011 and has as its focus the theme of Shared Norms for the New Reality. This year, ChildFinance was presented at the IdeasLab session, which also offered participants the opportunity to engage in an interactive discussion around the topic.

Investing in kids' future pays off

Published on CFED from PHYSorg.com (Follow these links for more information and the full article!)

Oct 28, 2010

When parents set up long-term savings accounts for college, business start-ups or home ownership, kids feel more financially and emotionally secure, new research shows.

The studies show the importance of families using child development accounts (CDA) as one measure to shift from an overreliance on credit and create a foundation for asset building. In other words, this program encourages households to maintain less debt and more savings.

CDAs can start as early as a child's birth. Deposits, earnings, and incentives help build the account over time, said Trina Shanks, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan.

The account becomes more of a family affair as the children learn about the importance of savings and achieving education goals, she said.

"As the child grows older, there may be additional opportunities to learn about financial concepts and for the child to become more directly involved in making deposits or monitoring the account," said Shanks, who co-authored two recently published papers regarding CDA in Children and Youth Services Review.

Shanks has studied how child development accounts and other asset-building programs focused on children impact their short- and long-term outcomes.

Successful parent-child interactions can lead to the child having more self-esteem. This establishes a smoother transition into greater responsibilities and independence as the child grows older, whether in school, relationships or employment, Shanks said.

But for children growing up in disadvantaged circumstances, a child development account alone might not be sufficient, Shanks said. Particularly when early life experiences include persistent economic strain and toxic stress, supplemental interventions might also be necessary to help the child navigate critical milestones.

One CDA project that Shanks participates in is the Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED) in Pontiac, Mich., one of 12 such programs nationwide. In this program, parents of preschoolers who opened a SEED account received an initial deposit of $1,000 from SEED funders into a 529 college savings account when they fell within state income guidelines. The results for this group were compared with a control group. Among the 495 accounts, the total accumulation after nearly four years averaged $1,483.

"While levels of saving may seem modest, the amount ($1,483) is sufficient to cover approximately 60 percent of one year's tuition at a community college," she said.

Given that the overall SEED demonstration had a four-year funding period, different programs targeted differing age groups. While the Pontiac program targeted pre-school students and their caregivers, other community-based sites targeted elementary school children, middle school children, high school children and children aging out of foster care.

Shanks said parents are excited about the accounts and what it might mean for their children's future, even when current financial circumstances prevented them from making additional deposits.

"SEED showed that CDAs are a viable policy option across a variety of circumstances," she said.

Pacific Islands News Institution (PINA) published a blog-post in early October this year reporting about excessive penalty fees levied by local banks. This issue received attention after similar cases have become public in Australia. "Ms Kumar [Fiji Council CEO] noted last year banks charged Australian households almost 1 billion in penalty fees from overdrawn accounts, credit card late payment and payment using over the limit and so forth."

According to the post, financial literacy programs in Fiji put special emphasis on "equipping people with skills on how to plan household budgets, need and ways of savings, preparing savings plan and micro-finance." Ms Kumar's reasoning is very much in line with ChildFinance's approach when she states: “Educated consumers can benefit the economy by encouraging genuine competition, forcing the service providers to innovate and improve their levels of efficiency.’

Ms Kumar continues that financial education of children and youth has to include consumer protection as an essential factor among pillars such as savings and micro-finance. In fact Ms Kumar makes an explicit case for the need of child-friendly banking regulation, when she concludes "junior secondary students opened banks accounts and saved money but their accounts closed due to maintenance and other fee charges."

This case from Fiji demonstrates the global scope of the issue and the need for concerted action in addressing the challenges on a global level.

Click here to read more

The Internationa Youth Foundation (IYF) announced the launch of YouthMap, a new innitiative together with the U.S. Agency for International Development in order to collect data to obtain a comprehensive picture of the youth in the specific countries. IYF explains that this kind of research was necessary to tailor programs that effectively link in with the realities of the youth in these countries.

IYF's president and CEO William S. Reese commented: "Gaining a real understanding of the conditions that young people are facing in their communities, as well as their aspirations for the future, is absolutely essential if we are to design and implement programs that are relevant to their needs. This is a terrific opportunity for us to dig deeper into how young people across Africa view their lives and what kinds of skills or opportunities they think they need to be successful."

To read more, click here: IYFnet.org

The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has recently published an interesting post on their Blog about their innovative "Opening Minds"-program.

"Opening Minds" is a program currently implemented in over 200 high schools all over Britain. It aims at encouraging a more holistic, integrated approach to learning in order to promote innovative thinking. The goal is to move from "fact-based" learning to a competence-based learning approach. This by the way seems very much in line with the excellent talk recently highlighted under announcements by Sir Ken Robinson "Changing Education Paradigms", which I would again like to recommend to you.

Please click here to get to the full Blog-post: "How do we promote innovation whilst assuring high standards in education?"

PEDN Uganda is making great efforts to encourage children and youth to save. Today we would like to share a short excerpt from the PEDN's September 2010 Newsletter:

Our amazing saving pay out excites schools

Between 7th and 21th 2010, we held a payout of savings of 4,036 children in our super savers program in 81 schools in 3 districts of Jinja, Mayuge and Iganga. This enabled children buy scholastic materials.

Monitoring Savings in Schools

After the pay out exercise the Super Savers team visited all implementing schools to encourage children to save. It was interesting to observe that other children were attracted to save after witnessing their fellow children receiving back their savings.

For more Information mail to: pedn@pedn.org

The CFED Assets Learning Conference was held 22-24 September in Washington DC and included almost 1,100 participants. The program featured 60 concurrent sessions showcasing the best and most effective practices, research and innovations at the local, state, national and international level in asset building, homeownership, entrepreneurship and children's savings. The innovation marketplace featured many exhibits from the next generation of asset building programs.