Effectiveness of Financial Literacy Program at Schools. The Case Study of Schoolbank in Georgia

Abstract

This paper estimates the determinants of financial literacy for school children and also evaluate the effectiveness of the SchoolBank project. SchoolBank is a standard educational module developed by National Bank of Georgia (NBG) in collaboration with Child and Youth Finance International (CYFI). The empirical results show that neither gender and grade nor the geographical location of the school and the source of income do not significantly affect the initial level of financial literacy of selected school children. But a positive interdependence between having a bank deposit and financial literacy is captured. Another contribution of the paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of the SchoolBank project. The study shows the overall improvement of financial literacy among selected school children. Furthermore, we observe that such an improvement of financial literacy is mostly driven by a significant increase of financial knowledge and attitudes, while the effect on financial behavior is very limited.