A non-governmental organisation, Junior Achievement Nigeria (JAN) has partnered with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Bankers’ Committee to teach financial literacy to young people in the 36 states of the country in commemoration of the Global Money Week 2022.
The Global Money Week is an annual global awareness-raising initiative that emphasises the importance of ensuring that young people are financially literate through information, skills, attitudes, and behaviours needed to make sound financial decisions and achieve financial well-being.
The theme of this year’s Global Money Week 2022 was ‘Build your future, be smart about money.’
In line with this theme, members of the Bankers’ Committee, within the 6-day series of events and activities they earmarked on for the week, including the Financial Literacy Day, visited some selected secondary schools in the country to teach the students how to build their future through finanical litracy.
The Exective Director of JAN, Foluso Gbadamosi, noted that since the inception the organisation in 1999, it had reached over one million students in over 20,000 classrooms in the 36 states of the country and the FCT through over 5000 volunteers.
She stated that as part of a global network, JAN can leverage resources and expertise to deliver localised cutting-edge experiential programmes built on Junior Achievement World Wide’s (JAWW) four pillars of Work Readiness, Entrepreneurship, Financial Literacy and Digital literacy, to in- and out-of-school young people, aged 5 to 27, for free.
Gbadamosi appreciated the CBN and the Bankers’ Committee for partnering with her organisation to grow a financially literate generation, and also their commitment to help achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) 2030, with focus on quality education and no poverty.
“Raising children and youth to excel as financially independent adults takes intentionality,” she said. “As an organization aware of this, every year the Global Money Week is one we look forward to and another opportunity to invest in the lives of young people as we teach them how to earn, save, invest, and donate.”
According nto the Bankers’ Committe, the programme is designed in a way that connects diverse financial institutions to JAN schools, and leaders in these financial institutions serve as mentors to JAN students based on the financial literacy modules created by JAN.
The Committe believes that the need for young people to have a financially healthy mindset plays a pivotal role in helping them make smart-money decisions, especially one that makes a good outcome in the future.
The Commitee noted that, today, millions of adults live in debt and, in extreme cases, abject penury, due to inability to make proper financial decisions.
A representative of the Committe stated that a recent data by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reveals that a large number of children do not understand the basics about money and the majority of youth is not able to perform simple calculations related to interest rates.
They emphasised that the partnership is expected to achieve the ultimate goal of the Global Money Week by ensuring that children and youth have access to high-quality financial education, learn about money matters and make smart-money decisions that can improve their financial well-being now and in the near future.
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