Through Financial and Digital Literacy
We live in a world which is transforming rapidly with new financial-digital advancements happening every now and then. According to Development Asia, digital and financial literacy is a multi faceted concept with multiple definitions. They say that the knowledge of the products and services offered with an update on developments in the field is one of the aspects. A deeper understanding of this will give an idea about the loopholes and risks- which becomes another dimension of the same. Every Indian must have had a memory of standing in the queue to pay Electricity bill on a hot summer day or rushing to a travel agent to book a ticket. We have come a long way after that. Starting from payments to insurance, everything now is managed via the internet. Here comes the next challenge for this pace of development. In a country like ours with a multitude of low income groups, creating awareness and educating people becomes a testing task. This requires nothing but grassroot level engagement after identifying the literacy levels of the groups involved.
In May 2021, a group of Young Changemakers from TribesforGood set out on their journey to
empower youth from low income groups with the knowledge the same. Vama Madhani,
Shashwat S Khivasara, Maheeka Sharma, Samanyu Raj Malik under the guidance of
Ms.Meghna Joshi (Founder, Skilled Workforce Advancing Nation- SWAN) conducted online
workshops with small groups of students from SWAN on topics such as online transactions, Upi
id apps (G-pay, PayTM) etc.The session also focused on clearing doubts and breaking myths
about these platforms.
Even though the benefits of these platforms are many, one needs to admit the risks associated
with the same. Unfortunately, because of not having an overview of these loopholes, low
income strata often fall for such fraud baits. Another team of students from Tribesforgood
namely Zoran Singh, Keisha Virani, Anjolie Jain, Bhavikaa Goenka, Haardik Gupta, Kamakshi
Seth, Bhavya Uniyal, Umang Chauhan, Yachna Monga, Siya Kulkarni, Shreya Wairagade,
Bhuvnesh Nagpal, Avani Lankapalli and Shariq Hafizi created the much needed awareness by
talking about Cyber Security to people from diverse cultural backgrounds.
They got in touch with community leaders of YWCA (Young Women's Christian Association) as
well as students from organizations such as Pratyek(Delhi) and Thinksharp Foundation
(Mumbai) in order to spread the knowledge. With the guidance of experienced professionals
from the development sector like Ms.Meghna Joshi, Ms. Mandeep Kaur and Ms. Saloni Goel,
the highschoolers delved into multiple aspects of Cyber Safety during the course of 6 weeks.
The participants of the workshop were systematically instructed on how to secure their mails,
phones, social media handles and even online shopping applications.
Urban dwellers like us might consider Cybersecurity and Digital Financial operations to be a
cakewalk. With the amount of resources and facilities available, these services are easily
accessible to all of us. As mentioned earlier, we do not realize how small the spectrum of “us” is
in reality. It is only through citizen led initiatives that one can contribute to this cause. In this
case, the work done by the Young Changemakers has an immense amount of potential to pass
on the awareness to not just a small group of people, but a community. The empowered
community representatives of YWCA, students of Pratyek and Thinksharp Foundation become
the leaders of change who can make a community digitally and financially independent.