On February 8, Fred Melch Ssewamala, PhD, a renowned social and economic development scholar, was installed as the William E. Gordon Distinguished Professor at the Brown School of Social Work.
Top Ghana officials, representatives from more than 20 financial institutions and practitioners met in April in Accra, Ghana, to learn about YouthSave research findings and how they could encourage young people to open bank accounts and save.
In 2010, researchers in the vast YouthSave Initiative started investigating whether low-income youth can build savings in the developing countries of Colombia, Ghana, Kenya and Nepal. Now their findings are summarized in a newly released report.
YouthSave researchers gathered recently in Washington, D.C., to discuss what they learned over five years about how to provide scalable saving mechanisms to low-income youth—and what their findings could mean for youth development and financial inclusion.
Most young people in Sub-Saharan Africa are not saving money, and an article in the journal Global Social Welfare explains what helps or hurts them in their efforts.
A groundbreaking project examining the attitudes and practices of young people in developing economies toward saving money has led to new findings that confirm and challenge assumptions about youth saving at formal financial institutions.
Children in four developing countries saved more than $1.8 million during the YouthSave initiative, one of the largest scientific studies of the effect of savings on people ages 12 to 18.
Low-income youth in developing countries will save their money in a formal account when given the right opportunity.
Brown School alumna Molly Wimonmat Srichamroen has created a first-of-its-kind children’s savings program in her native Thailand, using knowledge she gained at the Center for Social Development. Srichamroen was also a scholar in Washington University’s McDonnell International Scholars Academy.
A special issue of “Economics of Education Review” marks the first comprehensive set of studies that link assets and educational attainment. Research provides evidence that college savings should be included in policies for educational financing.
Representatives from the Center for Social Development at Washington University recently traveled halfway around the world to meet with colleagues from the YouthSave Consortium, and had the unique opportunity to talk with Nepalese youth and learn more about their savings experience.
Do Ghanaian youth have money? How do they get it? What do they do with it? These are questions we are beginning to answer in YouthSave using data from a baseline survey of over 6,000 in-school youth.
The Center for Social Development at Washington University’s Brown School will host a Symposium on International Research and Innovation on April 17, 2012, to examine the process and experiences of building international research partnerships and highlight innovations in economic empowerment and financial inclusion in international settings.
In Assets and the Poor, Michael Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, writes that asset accumulation is structured and subsidized for many non-poor households, primarily via retirement accounts and home ownership.
Our Integrative Case Studies, conducted by research partners in the four YouthSave countries in collaboration with the Center for Social Development, aim to capture the contextual factors that will affect YouthSave outcomes and operations.
Available evidence suggests that youth savings has the potential to improve the well-being of low-income and vulnerable youth, but globally, the number of youth savings programs is relatively small.
The MasterCard Foundation calls the five-year YouthSave project,“a landmark, global research initiative that will test how to sustainably deliver savings services to low-income youth in the developing world.”
The forum will be held on May 6, 12:30-6:00 PM (ET) at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, and will be accessible to all via a live webcast.
The availability of savings products for young people, especially in the developing world, remains extremely limited despite demand for safe and regulated institutions, a large potential market, and growing evidence about the potential of savings to benefit youth.