How financial literacy impacts youth prostitution, AIDS, and women’s survival | Big Think

Judith Bruce: Financial literacy is kind of bedrock to any long-term change pretty much for everybody, but certainly for females. The world spends a lot of time talking about the SDGs—these are the sustainable development goals, mention all sorts of goals—health, equality, participation—that cannot be realized unless you have some authority over resources. You can know a right, but if you don’t have a way of getting that right or a bargaining position then it’s just an idea.

For girls, they begin to see themselves as just an extended part of other people. They begin to define themselves as doing household and “domestic activities.” They don’t see themselves for what they are, which is vital economic actors. So, the first thing financial literacy does is it says you’re an economic actor. You’re making economic choices every single day with the way you use your time, the way you use scarce resources; much of the work that you do makes it possible for someone else to do some other work. So, just an identification.

Financial literacy also means building specific capabilities, being able to analyze situations, risk situations, and opportunity situations. For example, when you’re working with a population that has never thought of themselves as being economic contributors, if you ask the question “Well, imagine that you’re a girl of 12 in domestic service, what are the times that you are in the riskiest position?” People will say, “Well, when you asked for your salary, because if they don’t give it to you, you have no recourse; you’re on the street.”

If you ask, for a young married girl, “How is it she’s going to choose a number and timing for children?” Well, she’s not. She’s not unless she has some bargaining position with her partner. If the partner has complete control over her (sexually) and her fertility, she has no way of saying “I don’t want to have a child now” or “I want to wait.” So, her being able to control some resources and not feel completely dependent is crucial.

What happens often is that young women, females, are working and they’re earning, but they are not – they’re trying to save but they’re turning over almost all of what they make and their time to other people. So, financial literacy makes them aware of the fact that they are, daily, supporting not only themselves but others. It also teaches real-world financial inclusion skills. What are different kinds of savings? What different kinds of savings do you need to have?

You need to have emergency savings because, particularly for the poorest, if you don’t have some money aside for an emergency, then a young female in particular is at immediate high sexual risk. She may need emergency savings to help another family member. Then there are longer-term savings, which are goal-oriented, for example, saving up towards education.

We have in our work something called the cash flow tool, and I remember in Haiti after the earthquake, we became aware that there was a catastrophic level of sexual violence against the girls. Most of these households were run by beleaguered women, lean-to’s—it was a desperate situation. The programs that did exist were called “child-friendly spaces,” which lump boys and girls together, and ultimately in most cases had older boys only and were unsafe places for girls.

The bathrooms were put in places that the girls couldn’t get to safely, and there was a kind of – they were like war zones. So, in July after the earthquake, we had a workshop in Haiti and we started talking about: at what age did a girl in Haiti need to really understand not only her safety, but how to resource for herself safely? We had previously put the age at eight, and we had a 12-year-old there, and she said, “No, no, it’s six. It’s at six girls need to know this information.”

In that setting, we often brought out something called the cash flow tool. So, we asked people to draw pictures of several different types of girls by age and by education, and then we asked them now to list the place...