Financial National Education Campaign Programme receives positive response – Patience Boham

 The Chairperson of the Financial Education Mul­tistakeholder Committee (FEMCOM), Mrs Patience Arko Boham, says it had received pos­itive feedback from the citizenry following the implementation of the Financial National Education Campaign Programme.

The Financial National Educa­tion Campaign Programme, a com­ponent of the United States (US) $30 million project launched by the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and the World Bank aims to strengthen Ghanaians’ financial capabilities and promote responsible financial behaviours.

Mrs Boham made this known at a dissemination workshop organ­ised by the MoF in Accra yesterday to update stakeholders in the finan­cial sector about progress made so far following the implementation of the campaign.

Present at the workshop were the representatives from the Bank of Ghana (BoG), National Insur­ance Commission (NIC), Ghana Deposit Protection Commission (GDPC), Ghana Stock Exchange, and other regulatory agencies.

According to Mrs Boham, the town hall meetings, media engage­ments, and other strategies em­ployed during the campaign helped enlighten the citizenry on various financial-related topics such as in­surance, banking and investments.

She explained that her outfit had to engage the World Bank at vari­ous stages of the implementation process for inputs as it sponsored the whole programme and also trained spokespersons for the campaign.

The MoF together with FEM­COM, Mrs Boham explained undertook 11 town hall engage­ments with the target audience being trade associations, vulnerable groups, students, security agencies, among others, and was amazed by the lack of understanding of financial-related issues displayed by the target audience.

“This whole financial journey has been a journey. We started with stakeholder consultations and we had a group we were working with called the FEMCOM. Together with the consultants, we designed the programme, but before that, we went to the field to elicit the views of the citizenry to under­stand their financial literacy level and that informed the design of the programme and the documents we churned out,” Mrs Boham said.

“We went to the field and we realised that people did not under­stand simple basic things like next of kin, and redress mechanisms available. So, through financial lit­eracy education, these things came up and we were able to resolve them”, Mrs Boham added.

Speaking on the issue of next of kin, the Chief Manager of Fi­nancial Stability Department, BoG, Mr Augustine Amoako Donkor, explained that any individual who was made the next of kin by an account holder in the banking sector was not entitled to the funds of that ac­count holder should he or she pass away.

The con­sultant for the programme, Mr Charles Yao Mawusi, during his presentation on the programme noted that several educative materials such as bro­chures, a simplified handbook, as well as jingles had been developed.

However, he explained that online engagement was yet to commence because of the work that had to be done on the website to be used.

Mr Mawusi noted that they were able to reach out to two million people with its messages, but explained that with adequate resources the programme could reach more people to achieve its objectives.

 BY BENJAMIN ARCTON-TETTEY & PRECIOUS NYARKO BOAKYE

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