Abstract
Governments and non-governmental organizations promote school-based financial literacy programs as means to instill financial behaviors that can persist through adulthood. We conduct a randomized trial of two financial literacy education programs in government-run Ghanaian primary and junior high schools. The first integrated both financial and social education, while the second included only financial education. Our study finds that after nine months, both programs had positive impacts on self-reported savings at school relative to the control group, but there were no statistically significant increases in aggregate savings nor in hypothesized mechanisms such as attitudes, preferences, or knowledge. The financial education-only treatment led to a weakly statistically significant increase in child labor relative to the control group, although the difference in impact between the two treatment groups was not statistically significant. The lack of short-term effects of these programs on financial behaviors and attitudes indicate that alternative program designs should be evaluated to understand whether and how these outcomes can be influenced among students in this age group.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 71-89 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Journal | World Development |
Volume | 102 |
Early online date | 21 Oct 2017 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Feb 2018 |
Funding
Thanks to Kehinde Ajayi, Susana Peralta, Genevieve Melford and seminar participants at NEUDC and the NOVA School of Business and Economics for useful comments and discussions. We are also grateful to Aflatoun, Netherlands Development Organization, Women and Development Program, Ask Mama Development Organization, Berea Social Foundation, and Support for Community Mobilization Projects and Programs for collaboration and implementation of the programs, and thanks to Hana Freymiller, Gabriel Tourek, Christian Damanka, Jessica Kiessel, Pace Phillips, Suvojit Chattopadyay, Elana Safran, Carl Brinton, and Ellen Degnan at Innovations for Poverty Action for assistance managing the field research and analysis. This work was supported by the Financial Education Fund. The research team has retained complete intellectual freedom from inception to conduct the surveys and estimate and interpret the results. All errors, omissions and opinions are those of the authors and not necessarily those of any affiliated institutions.
Keywords
- financial literacy
- savings
- youth finance