In Tanzania, youth – especially girls – are missing out when it comes to accessing important financial literacy education. But what is financial literacy? Well, it’s the different skills that help you understand how money works and also helps you develop good money-habits, like saving or making a budget. Once you know these skills then you will be able to keep your money under control all your life.
At Ubongo, we’re always on the lookout for new ways to help young people like YOU grow and succeed. We joined hands with DLI and Spring to figure out why girls are missing out on key financial literacy education and see what we at Ubongo could do about it. To find out what girls think about money, we travelled to rural parts of Nakuru (Kenya), Mwanza and Shinyanga (Tanzania). Just like kids in the city, the girls we spoke to got pocket money which they usually spent on candy and chips.
Next, we got creative! We came up with three brand new Ubongo Kids episodes teaching some of the most important money-management skills: saving, earning and budgeting. In these episodes our gritty girls start a savings club, figure out safe ways to earn money and use their ‘Ubongos’ to make a budget.
But we didn’t stop there – we also wanted to hear what YOU, our viewers, think! At the end of each episode we invited you to tell us what you think about money and employment. The response we received was amazing, with around 700 of you sharing your thoughts with us each week. In fact, your responses were so interesting, we decided to make some short videos to share the feedback with all of you too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a1nmFK5qtI&t=68s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VCyWoENB-U&t=0s&index=15&list=PLjSFjqcCS3M9heNXzyDl_5UNexNsWTtO1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz46BOHUUD0&t=126s
Here’s what you had to say about…
Savings (how do you keep your money?)
Earning (where do you get your money from?)
Lots of you felt education is important and said you save money to buy school supplies or for other educational goals. Many of you also told us where you save your money, with a bank account being the most popular place for saving.
We also wanted to understand how our viewers decide how much money to save, and how much to spend, so we asked you to tell us if you use a budget. 80% of you said you do use a budget to plan how to use your money.
Budget (how do you manage your money?)
We loved hearing about your money habits and value all the feedback we received. It goes to show that learning financial literacy skills is important for EVERYONE: it helps us manage our money each day and to reach our future goals. We hope we can continue to collect feedback from our viewers to find out even more about what YOU think, and to make more Ubongo Kids content to help you learn and succeed.