A few weeks ago, YouthSave project partners from around the world convened in Washington, DC for our annual Learning & Exchange Conference (LEC). We’ve had three such meetings in the past, but this year’s meeting was especially exciting: during the meeting, we received the gratifying news that the number of teens with YouthSave-sponsored accounts has now gone well over 50,000. Equally exciting, we now have detailed demographic and transaction data on almost 11,000 of them, which has just been published in CSD’s first annual Savings Demand Assessment (SDA) report.
Beyond digging into the new data, the LEC gave us the rare and invaluable chance to pull up from our day-to-day work as project staff and advisors, researchers, and bankers – and talk about what our individual experiences and progress collectively mean. This kind of in-person reflection and stock-taking is critical for a learning project with stakeholders scattered across four continents; for all the virtues of technology, it still seems that ideas cross-pollinate much more easily from across the room than across a Skype connection!
And indeed, for all the diversity of perspectives, there were some strong common currents which surfaced from that stream. Of course we focused on detailed analysis of project strategies and results – the cost of various marketing tactics, transaction patterns among different groups of youth savers, business case analysis – and we’ll be sharing some of the insights that emerged in the weeks to come. But the “meta-conversation” that developed between and around the sessions focused not on the data, but on what it tells us about the most fundamental questions that will shape whether millions more youth – not just thousands or even hundreds of thousands – have the chance to build savings in the future.
What were some of these Big Questions? Here’s just a sampling:
Scalability: Are there limits to a youth savings strategy designed for scale, when it comes to including the most marginalized youth? And what is the role of the public, private, and social sectors in expanding those limits?
Business Case: If we are aiming for private-sector provision, how do we understand trade-offs and resolve the tensions between commercial imperatives and impact for young people (for example, between the ease of reaching youth through their parents, and the goal of building young people’s financial capability)?
Youth Financial Capability: What supports or interventions are really critical for building youth financial capability? Is financial education definitely part of the equation – and if so, what kind, how much, and who should pay?
Though YouthSave will be using its data to shed light on many of these issues in the future, questions of this magnitude are too big for any one project. The good news is that a growing number of industry initiatives are beginning to yield results that, together, may point us in the right direction. (We were privileged to be able to hear from three of them at this year’s LEC – UNCDF’s YouthStart Project, Freedom from Hunger’s AIM Youth Project, and Women’s World Banking’s Youth Savings Practice.
The past three years of work on YouthSave have allowed us to bring together a panoply of partners with complementary skills, and the relationships forged are now enabling initiatives and investigations that simply could not have happened before – and will hopefully continue to enable them well into the future! Similarly, we look forward to more opportunities to collaborate with and learn from our industry colleagues outside of YouthSave, to bring our collective knowledge and perspectives together into an even bigger stream. Answering the Big Questions around youth savings will require nothing less.
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Rani Deshpande