Students to become teachers in practical money skills campaign launched

The campaign, which involves a contest open to students at eight universities in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, tests teams on their knowledge of financial literacy and challenges them to come up with the most creative way to share personal money management tips among fellow students. Participants will be encouraged to use social media and other online tools, together with student-led forums, to reach student communities.

To help teams put together their programmes from now until the submission deadline on September 11, 2013, participants are required to organise and host a series of Money 101 forums on campus where they will be able to try out the feasibility of their ideas and programmes with fellow students.

The first of these Money 101 forums will be assessed by representatives from CCVSA who will guide the participants in their proposals. These forums also provide students with platforms to interact with their peers and learn best practices from financial experts.

Speaking at the launch of the campaign today in Hanoi, Mrs. Lorijon Bacchi, country Manager, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, Visa, said: “For more than a decade, Visa has been developing financial literacy programmes that teach individuals how to spend, save and budget responsibly.

With this joint campaign with CCVSA, we are guiding and empowering students to develop their own programmes to teach their peers about the fundamentals of money management. We are looking forward to creative entries that are fun, interactive and can help young people acquire money skills to lead successful lives.”

Entries will need to be presented to a panel of judges from Visa, CCVSA and the State Bank of Vietnam, and will be graded based on the programme’s relevance to the financial literacy themes of spending wisely, saving and budgeting as well as its effectiveness in reaching out to university students. To make the campaign even more relevant to participants, the winning teams will get chance to further promote financial literacy programme to a wider audience.

In a 2012 global survey to benchmark the level of financial literacy among 28 nations, Vietnam was ranked 26th, only ahead of Indonesia and Pakistan. The survey found that one in three (33 per cent) respondents in Vietnam do not maintain a household budget to manage income and expenses. In addition, those aged between 18-24 years old are also the most likely not to have a budget compared to older respondents.

The 2013 Practical Money Skills campaign follows the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Visa and CCVSA to deliver financial education programmes to students in Vietnam. The three-year partnership will deliver financial education programmes to benefit thousands of university students. Since 2012, Visa and CCVSA have jointly organised road shows to promote financial literacy awareness and to teach students the basic concepts of spending responsibly while learning to save and budget wisely.