Emirates Foundation's Financial Literacy programme, Esref Sah, was developed in response to the need for greater awareness among young Emiratis about how to manage their personal finances. This need became apparent through extensive research undertaken by the Foundation in addition to the output of a series of workshops with relevant stakeholders also concerned about and working on this issue. The
UAE continues to face serious issues related to debt among young people that lead to a negative social impact. Prior to the launch of Esref Sah, there was no nationwide programme to address this issue and yet statistics revealed that some 70% of Emiratis under the age of 30 are already in debt. The research and development of the programme during a one year period, clearly showed the need for a scalable programme that could teach young people relevant skills, champion the cause of promoting financial literacy, while also engaging all key actors. One of the core activities includes providing financial literacy workshops through its mobile bus. Since the programmes launch, more than 35,000 individuals have been trained. Other activities within the program include providing personal finance workshops to universities and educational institutions, developing youth who may act as champions for the program and help spread the message of financial awareness, an active social media campaign which reaches out to thousands of individuals globally, the distribution of a digital coin bank to participants of our workshops which encourages them to save, and the development and implementation of a financial literacy curriculum which has been imbedded into the national curriculum in public schools all across the UAE. Financial as well as educational institutions now also have a key role to play in spreading this message of awareness, that is why the Emirates Foundation is always looking for organizations which have a similar mandate and with whom we can work with towards achieving our core objective of youth development.
