 The Impact of Financial Education for Youth in GhanaJames Berry, Dean Karlan and Menno Pradhan World Development, 2018, vol. 102, issue C, 71-89 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. Keywords: financial literacy; youth finance; savings (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:102:y:2018:i:c:p:71-89 DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.09.011 Access Statistics for this article World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes More articles in World Development from Elsevier |
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