Financial sector regulators urged to support monetary literacy

The Young Investors Network (YIN), a Non-Governmental Organisation working to deepen financial literacy among the Youth, has called on financial sector regulators to support its efforts at providing the youth with the requisite financial education.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Mr Joshua Mensah, the President of YIN, said the Network had, since its establishment in 2010, trained more than 100,000 young people and looking forward to training about one million this year.

He said the current happenings in the financial sector, where scammers had taken advantage of the weaknesses, has necessitated the need to train more people with the accurate financial skills to better the lot of the sector.

He called on the regulators to support the activities of the Network, which already had closer relations with the younger population in the secondary and tertiary schools, to deepen their knowledge on the financial sector.

Mr Mensah said although the Security and Exchange Commission had provided huge support to the Network, the other regulators had not been collaborative enough towards the financial education agenda.

“We are calling on the other regulators thus the National Insurance Commission, the Bank of Ghana and the National Pension Regulatory Authority to support us in promoting financial literacy in the system because many Ghanaians no longer have faith in the system,” he said.

Mr Mensah said if trust was broken in the banking industry it would have an adverse effect on the financial sector.

Mr Kofi Busia Kyei, the Executive Director of YIN, said the Network had made attempts to reach the regulators to support both technically and financially but “it seems the response has been a little slow.”

“So we want them [the Regulators] to respond to us because the youth need them to come and help us otherwise the future of this country's financial sector would be bleak.”

“This year we are embarking on a lot of financial literacy education so we are calling on the regulators to assist in reaching many people with financial knowledge to make the right decisions.”

Mr Kyei noted that the first on the calendar is the Global Money Week, which would focus on promoting financial education, followed by the Young Investor Challenge, focused on promoting financial education on the stock market.

“Through the Global Money Week observation, we want to train more than one million people, giving them a lot of education on financial literacy.”

He called for support to enable the YIN to extend its financial literacy to all the 10 regions of the country.