Bringing Financial Literacy and Education to Low- and Middle-Income Countries

This chapter presents a World Bank led work program that is financed under a trust fund by the Russian Federation. This program together with other activities, partly led by the OECD, aims at supporting the development of effective financial literacy and education strategies and programs in low and middle income countries. The work program and the selected two activities and their staging have been motivated by the experiences and lessons of high-income countries with financial literacy programs and the deviating characteristics of low and middle income countries; both are reviewed in the paper. The first activity will develop an operational survey instrument to measure financial capability in low and middle income countries across time and space. It takes as starting point the capability approach developed by the UK Financial Service Authority but adjusted through button-up multistage country pilots providing competitive grants and expert advice to the participating countries. The second activity will develop a common results framework that is linked to an M&E Toolkit to assess the impact of financial education programs and alternative interventions. Competitive grants are provided for impact evaluations of financial education programs and other interventions that fulfill criteria with regard to topics, delivery mechanism, results framework, and evaluation methods. As this is a multi-year work program in progress, the interactions with the international research community will be crucial to participate in the work and to provide feedback and guidance.