Financial Education Summit 2005

Call for blending micro credit with financial education

The Financial Education Summit 2005 began in Kuala Lumpur yesterday with a call for integrating micro credit programs with financial education to help expedite poverty reduction in Asia Pacific.

More than 250 delegates from 30 countries are participating in the two-day summit jointly organized by Citigroup and INSEAD at Prince Hotel with representatives from private, government, academic and non-government organizations (NGOs).

Speaking at the inaugural session, Donald J Johnson, secretary general of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), said good financial education can provide individuals with good life-long skills and habits to enable them to work sensibly in financial markets.

Ashok Vaswani, Citigroup CEO for Consumer Banking in Asia Pacific, said it is imperative that corporations, policy makers, practitioners and advocates collaborate closely to enhance the economic well-being of individuals, across all age groups, backgrounds and income levels.

"This financial education summit underscores our commitment to financial education regionally and globally," he added.

The Citigroup Foundation focuses its grants primarily on three areas: financial education, educating the next generation, and building communities and entrepreneurs, Vaswani explained.

Later, at the panel discussion on 'Increasing Financial Literacy in Low Literacy Communities', Dr Mostaq Ahmmed, a micro finance specialist, explained how micro finance is playing a key role in poverty reduction in Bangladesh. "The day we start micro finance, we start micro finance education," he said.

Bangladesh has started integrating micro credit with financial education much earlier, which is one of the reasons for making micro credit programs successful in Bangladesh, said Mostaq, who is also the director of Training and Technical Support of Paris-based Planet Finance and a former top executive of one of leading Bangladeshi NGOs.

In fact, integrating micro finance with financial education can build social capital more successfully and minimize risk, he said adding that women borrowers are playing the key roles in the micro credit programs in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is now trying to develop human resources to train officers for the NGOs so that these organizations can integrate micro credit programs with financial education more successfully, Mostaq said.

INSEAD is widely recognized among the world's top-tier business schools as one of the most innovative and influential one. It is the only business school with full-fledged campuses in Asia and Europe.