8 September 2023
The purpose of financial education is to improve people’s financial management and behaviour. That’s what the ASISA Foundation’s various programmes have sought to achieve over the Foundation’s first 10 years of operation, and it’s what the Foundation will continue to work towards into the future. But how do you know if the education you’re providing is achieving the desired impact?
ASISA Foundation Trustee John Manyike raised this issue during a panel discussion at the ASISA Foundation’s recent 10-year anniversary event. “There’s a huge gap when it comes to dealing with issues of measuring impact,” he said. “Impact answers a lot of questions, from programme design to the effectiveness of the programme, understanding the needs of the target audiences, and so on. But it’s more important to understand the extent to which the programme is changing behaviour. If you say you’re doing financial education and you’re not changing behaviour, it’s like shooting in the dark. There’s nothing to aim at.”
Since its inception, the ASISA Foundation has sought to answer that question by applying an intensive monitoring and evaluation (M&E) process to each of its financial education programmes. The Foundation partners with M&E specialists to generate trend analysis that measures the reach, percentage of knowledge transfer and percentage of participants who have shifted their attitudes (and who intend to change their behaviours), together with insights into how each metric has increased year-on-year or from programme to programme. Through that process, M&E becomes MEL: monitoring, evaluating and learning.
Hallid Smith, CEO of M&E partner Greenhouse Business Development, agrees. “For us, one of the most important things is the journey of change,” he says. “Having assessed the ASISA Foundation’s FLAME 1, FLAME 2 and FLAME 3 programmes, the change and improvement on those programmes have just been remarkable. As M&E providers we do a lot of impact assessments, and we give recommendations because we want to see impact. We want to see programmes changing the lives of the beneficiaries. Those recommendations are not always adopted by some of the other organisations that we work with, so to see the ASISA Foundation implementing those changes has been very rewarding for us.”
Smith points to some of the assessments Greenhouse conducted on the FLAME programme’s budgeting workshops. “We not only want to know whether the participants understand their budget,” he says. “We also want to have a very good understanding of whether they can do it, and the changes they made afterwards. Can they show us how it’s done? Was that knowledge applied? If not, why is that?”
By asking those questions and gleaning those insights, he says, the ASISA Foundation is able to make the necessary changes to its programmes to ensure infinite and effective impact. As John Manyike put it: “When it comes to financial education, the days of people talking only about reach have expired. Reach is not unimportant, but impact is even more so.”
