Visa’s national “Practical Money Skills” art exhibition hits the road in Vietnam

The programme aimed to teach university students about the importance of financial concepts such as budgeting, saving, and spending. In 2016, the programme’s fifth year, students have been tasked with creating phrases and posters that promote the merits of prudent financial management, with a particular focus on using both creative wordings and imagery to engage their peers.

“In each year of our Practical Money Skills programme, we present the participating students with new tasks, and without fail, every year they demonstrate the utmost creativity in meeting these challenges. This year, we’ve seen very inspiring submissions from our entrants, which have spanned styles as diverse as propaganda style, graphic design, and many others,” said Sean Preston, Visa’s country manager for Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

“This year’s programme serves a dual purpose: the students who have chosen to verbally or visually present their ideas have to think deeply about the value of financial literacy, while the art exhibition is designed to take the best representations of these concepts right across the country. This kind of peer-to-peer learning and communicating is crucial to ensure these important messages are reaching the young people of Vietnam in a tone and discourse that truly speak to them, rather than at them,” he said.

This year’s programme consists of two phases. The first phase started on April 7, and saw students across the country developing and submitting engaging catchphrases that capture the importance of financial literacy. Students who are more artistically inclined were then given the opportunity to draw on these pieces of writing to design posters, interpreting the financial concepts and turning them into eye-catching visuals.

Phase one attracted nearly 839 entries from 87 different universities across the country. For the first time, this year’s competition is open to students across Vietnam.

The second phase will see the 50 best posters and taglines submitted in the first phase exhibited at five universities across Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Danang, Haiphong and Quang Ngai.

To conclude the programme, the ten winning taglines and ten winning posters will be brought to Hanoi for a finale event in October where finalists stand to win a range of exciting prizes worth up to VND38 million ($1,700) in Visa prepaid cards.

A range of programme resources are available on the Facebook page and YouTube channels (which have 15,600 likes and 1923 subscribers respectively), teaching students how to budget, save and spend responsibly. The official programme website (www.practicalmoneyskills.com.vn) has achieved 28,430 unique visitors to date, and continues to provide useful advice from programme mascot Mr. Pocket, together with handy financial formulas and other tools.

This also marks the second three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between Visa and the CCVSA for the ongoing delivery of the programme. Since 2012, Visa and the 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.

Exhibitions will last for a week in each school during the last two weeks of September. The full list of exhibition locations is as follows,

- Hanoi: Hanoi Architectural University
- Haiphong: Haiphong University
- Quang Ngai: Pham Van Dong University
- Ho Chi Minh City: Foreign Trade University in HCMC Campus
- Danang: Danang University of Architecture

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