With Visa to increase the financial knowledge of students
Over 40 schools and 800 children and pre-adolescents will be involved in a course on coding, financial education, sustainability and enterprise with a focus on gender gap reduction. There will be labs for parents, too. The “Light Points” of Save the Children will be involved in the suburbs of Milan and Naples.
“Count me in! Me, too!” Can children and pre-adolescents become more aware, self-assured, strong-willed and capable of developing their future? In this context, the Fondazione Mondo Digitale in collaboration with Visa is promoting the Growing Tour, a course on financial education and STEM to attract the new generations to coding, economics and sustainability. By associating the use of technology to financial education, students in primary school (year five) and first-degree secondary school will learn to programme small robots and be introduced to the basics of financial education, so they can make better choices in relations to consumptions, savings and resources.
Games, tests, simulations, exercises, challenges ... the Fondazione Mondo Digitale has organised educational sessions with the participation of coaches from the Italian Association of Financial Educators (AIEF) and Visa staff as part of its corporate volunteering programme. The courses are dynamic, fun and exciting. The propose concrete tools to understand, interpret reality and learn both to stand out and account, an increasingly indispensable skill. On average, one Italian student out of five does not have the minimum skills necessary to make responsible and thought-out financial decisions.
According to the last OECD PISA Survey (Programme for International Student Assessment) on the financial skills of youth. Italy currently places 13th out of 20 countries. And it is the only country that reveals gender differences favouring men. This must be contrasted immediately to avoid fuelling the condition of uncertainty that youth have about their future and various forms of inequality. As pointed out by the EduFin 2021 Report, financial education is an indispensable element for an efficient and adequate management of personal and financial resources. Moreover, it is also a determinant factor in situations of crisis and emergency for careful consumption and saving.
After the pilot editions in Rome and Naples, Project Growing Tour will involve 40 schools throughout Italy for a total of over 800 children and preadolescents. In Milan and Naples, the project will also work with Save the Children’s “Light Points,” high education density spaces developed by the international organisation that for over 100 years has been fighting to saving children at risk in suburbs and the most disadvantaged areas of cities and guarantee them a future through free education and support to educational communities.
In these Light Points, Save the Children holds educational actions to increase financial awareness and generate empowerment and enterprise to contrast the exclusion of the most vulnerable groups. The labs last two hours and are conceived for children aged 13-16 and their parents (especially mothers).
In each of the 40 schools involved, one class will participate in the project, but the objective is to make the experience scalable. Participating schools will receive a free “Coding box” with tools and didactic material to test technology independently and make the labs replicable in all of the school’s classes. The project also involves custom-tailored teacher training.
