Financial Freedom Project
About the "Financial Freedom" Project
This project was developed for the South African Insurance Association (SAIA) project, funded by the Financial Education Fund (FEF) in South Africa to promote financial literacy in all South African adults, measured in radio audiences and utilising four broadcast stations and one non-broadcast station as a control group.
The intention of this project is to assist in financial inclusion, where audiences across the income spectrum in a country can access and sustainably use financial services that are affordable and appropriate to their needs. The majority of people on the African continent do not use formal financial services. This is both a symptom and a major cause of poverty since they are not able to benefit from the savings vehicles, transaction functionality, risk management tools and various wealth-building options offered by supervised financial institutions.
The project was an edutainment radio project for financial literacy, which was developed to increase financial capability (knowledge, skills, attitudes and to some degree, behaviour in the first instance), as well as to test the efficacy of financial education through the method of edutainment and the medium of radio.
In order to establish the effectiveness of this financial literacy project, monitoring and evaluation across the 26 weeks of broadcast was conducted. Prior to broadcast, a baseline study was implemented, which was repeated at the end of the survey in order to measure impact. The baseline study was conducted with people in the selected areas and a further quantitative study was amongst community members living within the broadcast footprints every six weeks during the broadcast, with a final endline study with the same people who had been interviewed at the baseline. Added to this baseline, listening groups were conducted.
The chosen areas for this study were:
- Ukhozi Fm – IsiZulu speakers
- Lesedi FM – Sesotho speakers
- Motsweding FM – Setswana speakers
- PhalaPhala FM – Tshivenda speakers
- Thobela FM – Sepedi speakers; the control (non-broadcast) group.
