Promoting Financial Literacy for girls with SPRING

Organisation: SPRING (funded by USAID)
Service: User Research, Content Co-Creation, Distribution, Impact Evaluation

The Challenge

While women currently make up over 50% of the labour force in Africa, they have very little control over the capital and resources on the continent. Moreover, in places like Tanzania, while a higher percentage of girls complete primary school education than boys, less of them graduate from high school and go on to receive a university degree. It is clear that there is a disparity between the amazing capabilities of women and girls, and the opportunities afforded to them by society. This is particularly concerning to SPRING, an organization (funded by UKAid) that works with innovative companies which help transform the lives of adolescent girls living in East Africa and South Asia.

Ubongo is working with SPRING prototype social and behavior change communication for adolescent girls through the Ubongo Kids platform. We have conducted extensive research on girls’ dreams, hopes, as well as how they view money, in order to co-create content that helps girls develop beneficial life skills and target behaviors (such as saving money/budgeting) tied to their ambitions.

The Partnership

First, Ubongo’s research team went out to Lake Nakuru (Kenya), Mwanza and Shinyanga (Tanzania), to speak to adolescent girls (aged 10-14) and their parents about their ambitions and challenges in life. We were especially interested in learning about girls’ knowledge and perception of money, in order to deduce what skills they needed to learn to improve their financial literacy and gain better control over their resources.

The 5 key things we learned were:

1. All the girls we spoke to expressed their ambition of achieving professional careers such as; doctors, lawyers, pilots, and that education was the key to achieving these ambitions.
2. Girls identified with female role models such as; their mother, aunt, local politicians and described their role models as hardworking, caring and ambitious.
3. Girls were in agreement that items they “want” rather than “need” should be purchased through their own savings.
4. Girls still desired the involvement of parents in financial decision making and parents cited the need for additional support in educating their daughters about financial literacy.
5. Parents desire girls to learn basic business concepts that involve allocation of capital expenses and reinvesting in diverse business ventures

The research and conversations we had with these AGYW informed how our content needs to be developed to teach financial literacy, with messages delivered via both peers and older role models, and topics divided to cover saving, spending and budgeting.

The Impact

As we work on producing the episodes on earning, saving and budgeting we are also working with research partners to look at the impact of these episodes on early adolescent girls across region. We are planning an impact study to begin in April 2018 to assess knowledge, attitude and behavior change outcomes from watching the content.