YouthStart, YouthSave and Women’s World Banking Participate in the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Youth

As part of the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Youth that took place in New York on 21-27 July 2011, the UNCDF-MasterCard Foundation initiative, YouthStart, hosted a side event on youth demand for financial services.

Panel participants in the event were: - Ben Shell, Senior Technical Advisor, Women’s World Banking - David Morrison, Executive Secretary, UNCDF - Maria Perdomo, YouthStart ProgrammeManager, UNCDF - Rani Deshpande, Director, YouthSave Project, Save the Children US

The panel highlighted key commonalities and differences in youth financial service-focused market research findings across three initiatives, YouthStart, YouthSave and Women’s World Banking - that are helping financial service providers across 11 countries mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa to design, develop, test and scale up services for young people. The research from these 3 initiatives confirmed that young people do save, they do it mostly through informal mechanisms and they do value a secure place where they can set their money aside. The panelist also highlighted the need for more youth inclusive regulatory environments as a way to boost access to financial services for young people.

In addition, during the panel, YouthStart released the paper ‘Listening to Youth: Findings and Recommendations from Nine Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa on Market Research to Design Financial and Non-Financial Services for Youth.’

Listening to Youth provides: - Recommendations on data selection and collection methods for financial service providers seeking to develop youth financial and non-financial services - Key findings of market research conducted by 18 financial service providers - Summaries of the findings of four financial service providers that followed best practices in their research

To watch the full video of the event please click here.

The MasterCard Foundation advances microfinance and youth learning to promote financial inclusion and prosperity. Through collaboration with committed partners in 48 countries, The MasterCard Foundation is helping people living in poverty to access opportunities to learn and prosper. An independent, private foundation based in Toronto, Canada, The MasterCard Foundation was established through the generosity of MasterCard Worldwide at the time of the company’s initial public offering in 2006. For more information, please visit www.mastercardfdn.org.

UNCDF is the UN’s capital investment agency for the world’s 48 least developed countries. It creates new opportunities for poor people and their communities by increasing access to microfinance and investment capital. UNCDF focuses on Africa and the poorest countries of Asia, with a special commitment to countries emerging from conflict or crisis. It provides seed capital – grants and loans – and technical support to help microfinance institutions reach more poor households and small businesses, and local governments finance the capital investments – water systems, feeder roads, schools, irrigation schemes – that will improve poor peoples’ lives. UNCDF programmes help to empower women, and are designed to catalyze larger capital flows from the private sector, national governments and development partners, for maximum impact toward the Millennium Development Goals. For more information, see http://www.uncdf.org/.

For further information please contact: Maria Perdomo, YouthStart Programme Manager, UN Capital Development Fund, maria.perdomo@uncdf.org