oa Advancing Financial Literacy For Transnational Families

Despite the dramatic recent growth of international migration wherein increasing numbers of households in the developing world have members working in other countries, there has been little research into the effectiveness of financial literacy on the saving and spending habits of migrants to the Gulf states. While much has been said in policy circles about the need to provide financial education to migrant individuals and families to help them make informed decisions about money matters, little evidence exists on the impact of such services in developing countries. In order to address some of these shortcomings, this research project has two interrelated objectives. The first objective is to design a financial literacy curriculum aimed at migrant households. The curriculum aims to encourage (temporary) migrants and their households back home to develop and work towards long-term and sound financial planning. The curriculum covers a variety of pertinent topics such as savings, budgeting, managing debt, and investing. The second objective is to produce a set of instructional videos on financial education using the contents of the curriculum. These are to be widely disseminated to low income bracket migrant populations in Qatar through DVDs and online videos. These videos are designed to overcome the limitation of relying on a limited pool of qualified teachers to deliver the curriculum's content as well as logistic challenges in hosting multiple classroom sessions. To our knowledge, this is the first set of instructional videos that have been developed for a Qatar-based migrant community to aid with the management of money matters. In the future, we plan to study the impact of these educational videos on migrants in Qatar to see how much of a positive effect the material has had on their lives and financial habits.