Chapter 12
Financial Freedom for Children—Global
PLENTY OF CHILDREN STAY AT HOME WITH THEIR FAMILIES, GO to school, and—by most culturally relevant standards—live an ordinary life. Some even help earn money to support their families. They are the lucky ones. They live at home and have some modicum of family life. But many others, not only in India but around the world, have created their own family and a completely new society by living on the streets. This not-so-exclusive street society exists in almost every country. Some countries call them street children, or urchins; others, gangs; and still others, the unwashed and unwanted. We have multiple names for these children, but for the most part, we just don't focus on their circumstances too much in our daily lives.
In Western societies we don't really live with the problem as an everyday occurrence, though we do sometimes see sporadic glimpses of such children as we go about our daily lives. We rarely think about what we are not seeing. And if we do see it, we become apathetically farsighted. If we live in a place where it is an everyday occurrence, then ironically, almost the exact same thing occurs: we stop seeing it and don't bother to focus our attention on something that happens as a matter of course. We become apathetically nearsighted. Either way, the problem of children and teens living hand-to-mouth on the streets, earning whatever money they can by mostly illegal and illicit means, is not something that makes us comfortable to think about.
Enter Jeroo Billimoria, an Indian social worker who, in an attempt to understand the life of some of “her street children” clients, actually went to live with them so she could best understand how to help them. She was quite proud of what she was learning on her nocturnal adventures until one night one of the street kids said, “I live on the streets. You can stay with us, and you think you know us, but you know you have a home to go to when you leave. It's not the same. You social workers go home at night and we have no one here to call for help. It's not the same at all.” That remark, combined with what she did see on the streets, did a lot to frame her thinking.
In 1996, Jeroo started Childline India, which in her words was not a prevention program to keep kids off the streets but a way to help them because they were already on the streets and being badly abused. It was a way to be there for them when they were harassed, accosted, or in trouble. It was a way to assist them during the nights (and later, during the day) when they had no place to go and no one to turn to. She built the program out of the most pressing needs that the street children told her they had because she knew that the people most able to understand the street community were the children who lived there.
Childline India offered a free call number for street kids to get help from any public phone. Over time, Jeroo realized that as families broke down, the most entrepreneurial of the kids would take to the streets. This hypothesis got support when, as a result of answering calls through the help hotline, Jeroo noticed that to successfully survive on the street the children had to be brave, smart, persistent, innovative, and creative. They took risks. They had the attributes of business entrepreneurs. But they were totally unsophisticated about money and often exploited financially by older children and adults as soon as they had any money. They were caught in a vortex of poverty that sucked them into a life of prostitution, drug use, and serial illegal activities and created a type of nonexistence that allowed their lives to be unseen, unheard, and unaccounted for.
These observations stayed with Jeroo.
Childline India became the first of its kind, a twenty-four-hour emergency toll-free telephone service with follow-up support to alleviate the distress of children without other resources. Run by trained street children, it took a holistic approach and partnered with an extensive network of child-service organizations, police officers, and social workers through a franchise model.1
News of the India program spread round the world, and by the time Jeroo turned around to take a breath, she had requests for replicating the program coming in from cities and countries worldwide. Understanding that true systems change comes through global efforts, in 2003 she founded ChildHelpline International (CHI). It wasn't long before the program spread to 133 countries and counting. CHI created a network of helpline services and today has answered over 140 million calls. Impressively, given the power of replication and spread, Jeroo and her CHI team were able to inspire a global policy movement and a huge policy change; in 2008, the United Nations International Telecommunications Union adopted a Supplement recommending one number for all toll-free children's helplines in all countries.
But Jeroo was not satisfied, because the program, though wildly successful from anyone's assessment, was not keeping children off the streets in the first place. She wondered what could be done to remove the abuse, what could alleviate the poverty, what could keep children in school, and how she could prevent the vicious cycle of street life from perpetuating itself. She dared ask herself the really tough question: what will ultimately change these children's lives?
It also started from my personal experiences, from the experiences I had when I was young. When my father was very sick, I had to take on the family finances and surprisingly found that I could manage it quite effectively. I was very young, about fifteen, and I could do it because my father had been guiding me every inch of the way.
Saving Children by Teaching Them to Save
Now Jeroo began thinking about herself and how she was empowered by her father to be able to help her family in crisis. She sensed that people don't understand the capacity children have to comprehend money matters, to believe in themselves, and therefore be able to change their lives. And all these thoughts coupled with another simple observation became the genesis for her new program: Aflatoun. Because children normally don't reach the streets before age eight, nine, or ten, they have already had one or more years of primary school. That means that Jeroo just needed to find a way to keep them in school and out of the streets. She decided to tackle the growing numbers of street children at the roots by teaching children enough financial literacy to keep them off the streets in the first place. She developed a school-based program that would rechannel children's entrepreneurial craftiness and their interest in making and having money by providing them with a monumental way to see life through a future lens and not merely a daily one. While CHI would continue to help kids on the streets, her new program, Aflatoun, would start with the kids in school, who were not yet living the street life.
The program is based on two premises: the professional one, which came from Jeroo's roots as a social worker and her drive to prevent any child from having to resort to a life on the streets, and a deeply private reason—Jeroo's firm belief that empowering children socially and economically allows them to become agents of change in their own lives, break the cycle of poverty, and contribute to a more equitable world. For her, the model is based on one word—trust: trust for others, and trust in yourself.
Jeroo started Aflatoun to prevent children from being shut out of their economic future by teaching them financial skills at an early age. Her upstream project would help keep them from living on the streets in the first place by teaching them to understand how to use their skills to both earn and save money.
Indeed, the target group for Aflatoun in many countries is poor children. These children will not have much money to save, but experience has shown that many children, even in poor countries, do get small sums of money—from their parents as pocket money, on special occasions from friends and relatives, as scholarships and prizes, or from after-school jobs.
The model presupposes that every human being is an agent of change and all have the capacity of being better than they ever imagined themselves to be. It is based on providing the tools to bring out the enhanced changemaking capacity of each child.
After one year in an Aflatoun program, a child from Burkino Faso had enough savings to buy a second-hand cycle. He began to rent it out, and now he has five cycles and is putting his brother into school along with others in the family. Stories like this abound. Children taking part in an Aflatoun program get their parents, siblings, and the community involved. Mothers who know that their children are learning to save quietly start to give some household money to them to put away. They let them use the money to start micro-enterprises supervised by Aflatoun. Children of one mother used their savings to buy materials to make and sell beaded items.
These microbusinesses, no matter how small, give the children the luxury of using the word “someday” and envisioning a future life. And envisioning a future out of none at all turns nightmares into beautifully sweet and secure dreams. Aflatoun is less concerned with the amounts saved than with instilling the habit of regular saving. Saving, planning, and budgeting have outcomes beyond immediate financial rewards. Of most importance is the future-oriented mind-set the children develop, an orientation that helps lead them away from financial vulnerability and teaches them how best to avoid becoming trapped in debt and poverty.
Leveraging her vast experience in pioneering social enterprises, Jeroo chose the most difficult (poorest) countries first and piloted her venture. After a staggering success in eleven nations, Aflatoun's goal was set to reach more than a million children by 2010. It exceeded that goal by four hundred thousand, spreading its vision and mission by franchising the curriculum and materials among a variety of local partner organizations in more than seventy-five countries.
When the Junior Achievement program of Namibia launched Aflatoun Namibia, the CEO of FNB Namibia Holdings said, “The Aflatoun programme not only teaches but encourages a savings culture in a structured way. A very important sentiment, if you consider that less than 3 percent of Namibians save regularly. We seem to be a nation of spenders, and as such are stuck in a cycle of generational poverty. Aflatoun aims to empower children to make a change and break the cycle of poverty by equipping them with the constructive tools of financial independence.”2 The announcement went on to note that the organization hoped an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 children would be exposed to the FNB program in the four-year period.
Building a System, One Piece at a Time
Aflatoun has reached one of its targets of seeing financial education for children and young people as a topic on the agenda for educators and policymakers in many areas of the world. But again, Jeroo has asked herself more hard questions: How are young people going to achieve financial independence if they don't have access to mainstream finance? How can we change the public policy agenda by creating a structural solution to breaking poverty and increasing empathy?
Since Aflatoun was equipping children with a good financial education, the students would be on the path to making wise financial choices. However, if they wanted to set up their own savings program—or start a small business—they had nowhere to turn for help until, at best, they turned eighteen. To complete the system she started with Childline, Jeroo decided to build yet another interlocking component. In July 2011 Child and Youth Finance International (Childfinance.org) was created with three advocacy goals in mind: to ensure that a hundred million children and youth have access to appropriate and low-cost financial products by 2015; to ensure that a hundred million children and youth have access to Child and Youth financial education by 2015; and to ensure that a hundred countries have in place an action plan supported by Child and Youth Finance International. To alter the age-old perceptions of children's needs and abilities in the realm of finance, Jeroo is planning to coordinate alliances with banks, financial regulatory agencies, national NGOs, and governments. All organizations involved will be invited to become part of the changemaking community. It's a huge effort—and given her track record for large-scale global successes, I have no doubt that 2015 is going to be a big year for children everywhere.
I asked what kept Jeroo going and if and when she saw an end to her mission. Her humble answer was what one would expect from someone who has influenced millions of lives and is solely focused on changing millions more:
I must be doing something right. I don't think about it. Most times—99.999 percent of the time—I don't think about it. Most, I think about what I have to do next. That's the status that I hold myself to.