Zazu’s Financial Literacy Programme:
What we’ve learnt

Zazu
Zazu
Sep 4, 2018 · 4 min read

On the 27th March 2018, we launched a pilot in the Copperbelt Province in Zambia. The pilot used USSD and IVR technology to teach people for free, how money really works. We developed 5 courses: saving, insurance, loans, mobile money and budgeting.

Before launching the pilot, we hypothesised that if we taught 2,250 people that would give us a good benchmark. We ended up reaching just under 6,500 people who took a cumulative 15,000 courses.

Who the learners were
Understanding how different people, in different professions interact with money, can only help financial service providers design and build better financial products for everyone.

Money: more than a utility
Whenever we spoke to our learners about their motivations for understanding how money really works, it was very clear from the language used, that money is more than a utility. It is an emotional topic, one that causes people anxiety, sleepless nights and anguish. Our learners worried about maximising & protecting what they had.

Against that backdrop, we set ourselves a challenge to simplify how ordinary people understand & interact with financial services. We believe that solving this, will have profound impact on a multitude of people today and tomorrow.

Our key take-aways:

a) Financial Institutions Work in Silos — As financial institutions are often competing for the same consumer, local (country) offices act as sales departments without power to influence group decisions. These corporate channels lack communication and prioritise short-term gains over meaningful collaboration.

b) Financial Exclusion Is Expensive — Resources are systematically directed at urban customers, thereby pricing rural customers out of financial services. However, if rural customers could expand respective financial literacy through mobile phones, this traditional relationship could change. Our primary motivation for doing this pilot, was to understand how financial exclusion affects people — beyond just reading about it.

Our learners told us how financial exclusion costs them: whether it’s travelling to get financial services, spending to get their account balances, feeling insecure to inquire about mobile money, insurance or loan products that could help them.

c) People Want and Need to Make Money Simpler — Consumers often don’t realise their rights within the financial services system, and feel powerless when complications arise.

When developing the courses, we wanted to make sure the content would be valued by learners and we struggled to adequately explain some topics in sound-bites. Internally, we had biases towards particular courses and were certain that other topics would do better than others (mobile money vs insurance). To our surprise, insurance was the most popular and most completed course. Our learners experience showed us that at this particular moment, insurance is relatively misunderstood and that people are desperate to understand before accessing it.

Zambia‘s Luapula Chiefs meet Zazu’s financial literacy tutor. Photo by Chipili Mwaba from FSDZ.

The number of unbanked people across Africa both presents a demonstrable need for increased financial inclusion, and an exciting opportunity to expand past traditional financial models to catalyse change.

There Are Over 350 Million Unbanked People Across Africa — Development financial organisations and governments have committed to the concept of financial inclusion, but these efforts will effectively be “vanity projects” if they do not pair with efforts to elevate regional financial literacy levels. How do we change this?

  1. Individuals — as consumers you wield incredible power to affect positive change. First and foremost:
    a)
    Ask your financial service providers what are they doing to #makemoneysimple
    b) Write to the regulators and tell them the changes you want in the market
    c) Question the financial products you are offered. Before making a decision on the provider and service, ensure that you have asked them all the information you need to make a choice that suits you.
  2. Entities
    We are not the first to tackle this global problem. In fact, there are so many dedicated institutions and individuals working on this. What’s striking, is how splintered the approaches and messages delivered are. Not only is this expensive and unsustainable, it’s doing more harm than good and it undermines the learning process.

We ask responsible institutions to:
a) Ensure that messages being delivered to beneficiaries are in harmony and follow internationally accepted best practices
b) Use your power to lobby regulators to ensure that they hold service providers accountable to #makemoneysimple

So what’s next?
This pilot enabled us to prove that it’s possible to teach people about finance using mobile phones. Here is to the next 50 000 learners.

Zazu is the helpful digital account that enables everyone to do more with their money. This pilot was a collaborative effort between Zazu and Financial Sector Deepening Zambia (FSD Zambia) http://www.fsdzambia.org/.

Zazu

Written by

Zazu

Zazu is a money app that helps you store, use and learn about money. It’s free to join, easy to understand and makes managing money effortless.

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