Indore NSE’s unique education initiative — FUNancial Quest to empower school students in

NSE’s unique education initiative — FUNancial Quest to empower school students in Indore

 

• National Stock Exchange (NSE) has tied up with Bhumika Higher Secondary School, SBB Public School and MalwaShishuViharin Indore.

 

India’s leading stock exchange, the National Stock Exchange, conducts many initiatives in different parts of the country to empower the youth and professionals with financial education so that they can take good financial decisions.

 

One such initiative is being carried out in 200 schools across 15 cities. This financial education drive in schools is addressed at students of classes 8 and 9, through which they are familiarised with basic concepts of finance like needs and wants, inflation, interest rate, value of money etc.

 

This is the second year that this initiative is being conducted. This year, more than 40,000 students is being covered in cities like Ahmedabad, Indore, Raipur, Dehradun, Lucknow, Nagpur, apart from some metros and tier II and tier III cities.

 

The initiative includes multiple programmes to sensitise students on the basics of finance as an essential life skill.

 

The workshop for students focuses on the concepts of financial planning, called the “The Three Jars: Spend, Save and Grow.”

 

In the workshop that is conducted by NSE representatives, students are educated on the importance of frequent saving, wise spending and growing money. They are trained to think about the difference between “needs and wants” in their daily life, on how they should spend on “needs” and try and curtail “wants” as much as possible. The idea is to train the students that they should not be guided or led by their wants, so that they can set aside some money for savings and investments.

 

In the next session of the same workshop students are taught the importance of savings. Here, the focus is on topics like importance of saving regularly, savings from a young age, saving for a longer period, saving with small amounts, and that savings must have a goal and a clear plan of action.

 

The third session - Grow - focuses on the importance of growing savings: how important is it to save for one’s financial well-being, and that it is important to grow one’s savings, instead of keeping it aside in non-productive assets.

 

After the workshop, students work on a project called ‘’My Hero”, in which they have to find their financial hero, who has faced financial challenges andhas overcome them effectively. Students are asked to shortlist a list of such people and interview them for a project.

 

As a part of this initiative, NSE also conducts special two-hour movie screenings for the students on inspiring global business leaders like Bill Gates to motivate young peopleto follow their dreams.  This is  followed by a project, in which students choose a career option of their choice and plan running a simulated business, in which they will have to work out logistics like where will they get the finance, capital and resources from, where will they get labour from etc. This will help in training children to think about how businesses are run, and the kind of challenges that are faced in the course of running a business.

 

The next workshop called Junior Economist focuses on economics where students are taught about trade, demand- supply and are given a brief on banking.

 

NSE has also introduced a website for educating India's young on financial basics, called www.nsefunancialquest.com. This interactive website is designed in such a way that it reaches out to educate a large number of students and explains the basics of finance to them at an early stage.