Peer-to-Peer Financial Education Takes Off in Kenya Project

Peer education has been defined as:

"An approach which empowers young people to work with other young people, and which draws on the positive strength of the peer group. By means of appropriate training and support, the young people become active players in the educational process rather than passive recipients of a set message. Central to this work is the collaboration between young people and adults."

This is the approach that YouthSave’s ‘Life Poa’ (‘a prosperous life’ in Swahili) financial education programme took in Kenya when it partnered with Hatua Likoni, a community NGO working to reduce unemployment and poverty in Likoni, Kenya. Through providing scholarships and various life skills training and mentoring, Hatua helps the area’s disadvantaged and brightest high school students gain the skills, credentials and networks they need to contribute to and benefit from Kenya’s growing economy.

Until about a year and a half ago, financial education (FE) was not part of Hatua Likoni’s life skills program. Two Mombasa-based YouthSave mentors, who conducted a five-day training for Hatua’s five staff, introduced the idea to incorporate FE training. Hatua’s staff then trained fifty of their beneficiary students, all of whom subsequently opened a SMATA savings accounts with Postbank. Beneficiary demand and engagement in the training thus confirmed, Hatua decided to integrate financial education into its program structure.

This is the kind of opportunity and partnership that YouthSave in Kenya was looking for - one that had the potential to ‘live’ beyond the project life and reach a significant number of youth. Also, employing the peer education approach, which is so core to Hatua Likoni’s approach, would give the project a chance to learn and share lessons from this model.

A formal partnership between Save the Children and Hatua Likoni was established and launched by conducting a week-long Training-of-Trainers workshop for twenty-four high school graduates in December 2013 so that they could become peer mentors. For Hatua Likoni, training these high school graduates (a) fit in with its mentorship program, which focuses on empowering young people through building their knowledge base and skills in relevant fields; and (b) enabled the organization to provide its client youth with a meaningful community service opportunity as they wait to join college or university in the next six months or so. Hatua Likoni benefited from the expertise of the country-based YouthSave team which conducted the workshops while YouthSave benefited from the long-term implication and learning opportunities of forging this partnership.

Barely out their teens, Hatua Likoni’s young mentors were experiencing a formal training for the first time. So it was not surprising that they were a little apprehensive at the prospect of training others, more so their peers still in school and not far from their age group. To make them effective trainers, this was an obstacle that needed to be overcome.

The opportunity to think, act, and feel – while keeping the training interactive and fun, a key youth learning principle –was critical in equipping the mentors with tools and resources on financial education. Different training techniques such as group discussions, debates, story-telling, games, and question-and-answer activities, were modeled for the trainers. At the same time, mentors learned financial education content including how to develop a savings plan, good and bad money spending habits, budgeting processes, and how to access banking services. The mentors also had the opportunity to practice what they learned through simulation exercises that included actual student participants.

By the end of the training, comments such as “I have learned to manage my nerves during the training,” “I never expected to be teaching people…but the training has given me the opportunity to discover that I am a really good speaker…" and “other than acquiring financial skills, I have also gained confidence in myself,” revealed a more confident group of young mentors.

A group conversation I had with this first group of mentors during a recent visit reconfirmed the many benefits they gained through their participation in the program. Mentors reported to me that, through their peer-to-peer teaching, they had gained the respect of their students, schools' administrations, and their community, many of whom now call them ‘teachers’. Beyond esteem and psychological gain, for these young people, this experience has also accorded them an opportunity that will boost their image with future employers.

Gabrielle Fondiller, the Director and Founder of Hatua Likoni, shared how amazed she was to see the students she had known as very shy transformed and expertly teaching sessions like ‘how to develop a savings plan’ and ‘budgeting’. The mentors too talked of enjoying training their peers who they found very easy to teach. Despite the mentors’ growing confidence, there were still a few bumps after training. The mentors had the tools they needed to train youth but lacked the skills to establish relationships with the schools’ administrations, from whom they required support to mobilize FE clubs. Staff of Hatua Likoni overseeing the young trainers were instrumental in accompanying the youth to the schools, introducing them to the administration and focal teachers. It took about a week before these youth gained the confidence to go to the schools on their own. By way of taking the lead, these mentors have appointed a representative amongst themselves to be the point person for the schools’ administration – a clear demonstration that leading by example is key to empowering youth.

With this support in relationship building, mentors were able to elicit a very positive response from school heads that they approached. One school dedicated two weeks for Life Poa during which the trainers had up to two hours to train students. That time frame enabled the trainers to complete the curriculum for the clubs they had formed. In another instance, the head teachers of five schools in Likoni organized with Hatua Likoni staff to have their entire student body trained. With an average of 400 students per school, the twelve pairs of mentors would form 12 clubs constituting between 25-40 students in a school. Lastly, based on the number of clubs, each school committed classrooms for these trainings.

Another lesson that emerged from this experience was the importance of an on-site visit by the master trainer during the first days of club operations. This provided the young mentors an opportunity to receive assistance on areas with which they needed help, such as how to calm down a class full of excited students or deal with difficult participants. Particularly for younger trainers, close support post-workshop has been key. Now that mentors are actively working in schools, the project is looking forward to two outcomes from this partnership. First, by the end of June this year, the young mentors will have trained about 4,000 high school students on financial education and provided them an opportunity to open a Postbank SMATA savings account. Secondly, participant mentors will use the knowledge, skills and attitudes gained through this experience to themselves exercise prudent financial management habits while in college or university.