Child Savings Accounts: Global Trends in Design and Practice

Child Savings Accounts (CSAs) exist as policies, products, and programs, and are being offered by governments, financial institutions, and non-profits. This paper aims to provide an overview of the landscape of CSAs around the world; a summary of reasons why governments, financial institutions, and non-profits are offering CSAs and features of the accounts they offer; and a few of the obstacles these institutions face to successfully offering CSAs. By examining the breadth of CSAs as well as the areas of overlap between features of and rationales for CSAs currently offered by various institutions, we hope to illustrate some global trends in CSAs.